The Routledge Handbook of Death and the Afterlife [1st Edition] 9781138682160, 9781315545349

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Title......Page 4
Copyright......Page 5
Dedication......Page 6
Contents......Page 8
List of contributors......Page 12
Acknowledgments......Page 17
Part I The study of dying, death, and grief: an overview......Page 18
1 Introduction......Page 20
2 State of the field of death in the United States......Page 27
3 Brain death and the politics of religion......Page 37
4 Understanding grief: theoretical perspectives......Page 47
Part II Disposal of the dead: past, present, and future......Page 58
5 Symbolizing imperial affiliation in death: case studies from the Inka empire (ad 1400–1532)......Page 60
6 The Romanian Orthodox Church and issues of cremation......Page 77
7 Reframing sites of the dead in Brazil......Page 89
8 Stand by me: the fear of solitary death and the need for social bonds in contemporary Japan......Page 102
9 Politics of death and mortuary rituals in Trinidadian Hinduism......Page 113
10 The right to be dead: designing Future Cemeteries......Page 127
Part III Representations of death: narratives and rhetoric......Page 138
11 Post Mortem (2010): Saint Salvador Allende and historical autopsy......Page 140
12 Mourning deaths and constructing afterlives in the Red Army at war......Page 153
13 Corpses that preach: Óscar Romero and the martyred priests of El Salvador......Page 170
14 Photographing human finitude: philosophical reflections on photographs of death......Page 185
15 De imago to word: the exile of the dead from parish symbolism in Reformation England......Page 200
Part IV Youth meets death: a juxtaposition......Page 210
16 The comprehension of death and afterlife in children......Page 212
17 The effects of parental death on religiosity within an American context......Page 225
18 Ashes to ashes: continuing bonds in young adulthood in the Netherlands......Page 236
Part V Questionable deaths and afterlives: suicide, ghosts, and avatars......Page 246
19 Exeunt: the question of suicide at the origin of early Christianity......Page 248
20 How not to become a ghost: tales of female suicide martyrs in sixteenth-century Vietnamese ‘transmissions of marvels’ (truyền kỳ)......Page 257
21 The cat came back: revenant pets and the paranormal everyday......Page 279
22 From ancestors to avatars: transfiguring the afterlife......Page 294
Part VI Material corpses and imagined afterlives around the world......Page 308
23 From the underworld of Yama to the Island of Gems: concepts of afterlife in Hinduism......Page 310
24 A broad survey of Zulu ancestor veneration and the challenges it faces......Page 319
25 Death and life in a pluralistic society: boundary-making and boundary-crossing in Sino-Burmese-Tibetan borderlands......Page 332
26 Viking death: pre-Christian rites of passage and funerary feasting......Page 344
27 Death, resurrection, and the world to come: Jewish views on death and the afterlife......Page 359
28 The afterlife and death: an Islamic perspective......Page 373
29 Coffins, candles, and cameras: aspects of Brazilian funerals from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century......Page 383
30 Buying an afterlife: mapping religious beliefs through consumer death goods......Page 394
Index......Page 410

Citation preview

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF DEATH AND THE AFTERLIFE

This Handbook traces the history of the changing notion of what it means to die and examines the many constructions of afterlife in literature, text, ritual, and material culture throughout time. The Routledge Handbook of Death and the Afterlife is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems, and debates in this exciting subject. Comprising twenty-nine chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into three parts and covers the following important themes: • • • • • •

The study of dying, death, and grief Disposal of the dead: past, present, and future Representations of death: narratives and rhetoric Youth meets death: a juxtaposition Questionable deaths and afterlives: suicide, ghosts, and avatars Material corpses and imagined afterlives around the world

Within these sections, central issues, debates, and problems are examined, including: the world of death and dying from various cultural viewpoints and timeframes, cultural and social constructions of the definition of death, disposal practices, and views of the afterlife. The Routledge Handbook of Death and the Afterlife is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology. Candi K. Cann is an Associate Professor of Religion in the Honors College at Baylor University, USA.

ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOKS IN RELIGION

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF MUSLIM – JEWISH RELATIONS Edited by Josef Meri THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF RELIGIOUS NATURALISM Edited by Donald A. Crosby and Jerome A. Stone THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF DEATH AND THE AFTERLIFE Edited by Candi K. Cann For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbooksin-Religion/book-series/RHR

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF DEATH AND THE AFTERLIFE

Edited by Candi K. Cann

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Candi K. Cann; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Candi K. Cann to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cann, Candi K., editor. Title: The Routledge handbook of death and the afterlife / edited by Candi K. Cann. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa Business, [2018] | Series: Routledge handbooks in religion | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018002586 | ISBN 9781138682160 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315545349 (ebook : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Death—Religious aspects. | Religions. | Future life. Classification: LCC BL504 .R695 2018 | DDC 306.9—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018002586 ISBN: 978-1-138-68216-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-54534-9 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

This book is dedicated to George E. Dickinson and Donald Joralemon, who cleared the path first in this field and helped me find my way.

CONTENTS

List of contributors xi Acknowledgmentsxvi PART I

The study of dying, death, and grief: an overview

1

 1 Introduction Candi K. Cann

3

  2 State of the field of death in the United States George E. Dickinson

10

  3 Brain death and the politics of religion Donald Joralemon

20

  4 Understanding grief: theoretical perspectives Kenneth J. Doka

30

PART II

Disposal of the dead: past, present, and future

41

  5 Symbolizing imperial affiliation in death: case studies from the Inka empire (ad 1400–1532) Colleen Zori

43

  6 The Romanian Orthodox Church and issues of cremation Marius Rotar vii

60

Contents

  7 Reframing sites of the dead in Brazil Renato Cymbalista and Aline Silva Santos   8 Stand by me: the fear of solitary death and the need for social bonds in contemporary Japan Chikako Ozawa-de Silva   9 Politics of death and mortuary rituals in Trinidadian Hinduism Priyanka Ramlakhan 10 The right to be dead: designing Future Cemeteries Jakob Borrits Sabra and John Troyer

72

85 96 110

PART III

Representations of death: narratives and rhetoric

121

11 Post Mortem (2010): Saint Salvador Allende and historical autopsy Moisés Park

123

12 Mourning deaths and constructing afterlives in the Red Army at war Steven G. Jug

136

13 Corpses that preach: Óscar Romero and the martyred priests of El Salvador Mandy Rodgers-Gates

153

14 Photographing human finitude: philosophical reflections on photographs of death Mathew A. Crawford

168

15 De imago to word: the exile of the dead from parish symbolism in Reformation England Lacy K. Crocker Papadakis

183

PART IV

Youth meets death: a juxtaposition

193

16 The comprehension of death and afterlife in children Ramiro Tau

195

17 The effects of parental death on religiosity within an American context Renae Wilkinson

208

viii

Contents

18 Ashes to ashes: continuing bonds in young adulthood in the Netherlands Renske Visser

219

PART V

Questionable deaths and afterlives: suicide, ghosts, and avatars

229

19 Exeunt: the question of suicide at the origin of early Christianity Michael J.Thate

231

20 How not to become a ghost: tales of female suicide martyrs in sixteenth-century Vietnamese ‘transmissions of marvels’ (truyền kỳ)240 Cuong T. Mai 21 The cat came back: revenant pets and the paranormal everyday Sara Knox

262

22 From ancestors to avatars: transfiguring the afterlife Jenny Huberman

277

PART VI

Material corpses and imagined afterlives around the world

291

23 From the underworld of Yama to the Island of Gems: concepts of afterlife in Hinduism June McDaniel

293

24 A broad survey of Zulu ancestor veneration and the challenges it faces Radikobo Ntsimane 25 Death and life in a pluralistic society: boundary-making and boundary-crossing in Sino-Burmese-Tibetan borderlands Keping Wu 26 Viking death: pre-Christian rites of passage and funerary feasting Davide M. Zori 27 Death, resurrection, and the world to come: Jewish views on death and the afterlife Nicholas R.Werse 28 The afterlife and death: an Islamic perspective David Oualaalou

ix

302

315 327

342 356

Contents

29 Coffins, candles, and cameras: aspects of Brazilian funerals from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century Andréia de Sousa Martins

366

30 Buying an afterlife: mapping religious beliefs through consumer death goods Candi K. Cann

377

Index393

x

CONTRIBUTORS

Candi K. Cann is an Associate Professor of Religion in the Honors College at Baylor University. She has published two books with the University Press of Kentucky – Virtual Afterlives: Grieving the Dead in the Twenty-first Century (2014), and Dying to Eat: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Food, Death, and the Afterlife (2018) – and is the author of multiple articles. She has been interviewed by BBC, The Atlantic, and NPR, and is currently serving as the co-chair for the Death and Dying committee with the American Academy of Religion (AAR). For more on her current work, visit her website at www.candikcann.com. Mathew A. Crawford is a doctoral candidate in the Religion Department of Baylor University. Having worked as a graduate assistant at the Duke Institute on Care at the End of Life and as a group bereavement counsellor, his interests center on philosophical theology and ethics as they pertain to human suffering and death. Lacy K. Crocker Papadakis is a PhD candidate in Religion at Baylor University. She focuses on ancient Near Eastern temple architecture and symbolism. Additionally, she has an interest in the relationship of death and dying and religious architecture and practices. Renato Cymbalista is an Architect and Planner. He holds a PhD in Architecture from the University of Campinas and completed a Post-doctoral fellowship in History at the same university. He is a Professor in the Department of History of Architecture in the School of Architecture of the University of São Paulo. He coordinates the research group Sites of Memory and Conscience and the Lab for Other Urbanisms in the University of São Paulo. George E. Dickinson, Professor of Sociology at the College of Charleston, is the co-author of Understanding Dying, Death & Bereavement 8e (2016), co-editor of Annual Editions: Dying, Death & Bereavement 15e (2017) and has published nearly 100 articles in professional journals, primarily on end of life issues. Kenneth J. Doka is a Professor of Gerontology at the Graduate School of The College of New Rochelle and Senior Consultant to the Hospice Foundation of America. A prolific author, Dr. Doka has authored or edited over thirty books and over 100 articles and book chapters. xi

Contributors

Dr. Doka is editor of both Omega: The Journal of Death and Dying and Journeys: A Newsletter to Help in Bereavement. He was elected President of the Association for Death Education and Counseling in 1993. In 1995, he was elected to the Board of Directors of the International Work Group on Dying, Death and Bereavement and served as chair from 1997–1999. ADEC presented him with an Award for Outstanding Contributions in the Field of Death Education in 1998. In 2000 Scott and White presented him an award for Outstanding Contributions to Thanatology and Hospice. Jenny Huberman is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of MissouriKansas City. Currently, she is conducting research on death in the digital age, and on transhumanism as a cultural and intellectual movement. Donald Joralemon is Professor of Anthropology at Smith College, Northampton, MA. His doctorate (University of California, Los Angeles, 1983) focused on Peruvian shamanism. He researches organ transplantation and medical ethics. He is the co-author of Sorcery and Shamanism (1993), and the author of Mortal Dilemmas (2016) and Exploring Medical Anthropology (2017). Steven G. Jug is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at Baylor University. He received his PhD in history from the University of Illinois in 2013. He has published articles on embodiment, masculinity, and romance in the Red Army. His current project examines soldierly subjectivity in the Tsarist Army in the First World War. Sara Knox is an Associate Professor Sara Knox presently teaches Cultural Studies and English in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University, Australia. Her research focusses on the cultural history of death and the representation of violence. She is author of Murder: A Tale of Modern American Life (1998) and a member of the International Editorial Advisory Board of Mortality. Her novel The Orphan Gunner (2007) was short-listed for the regional Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for first book, and for the Age Book of the Year. June McDaniel is Professor of the History of Religions in the Department of Religious Studies at the College of Charleston. Her PhD was from the University of Chicago, and her MTS was from Emory University. Her research areas include mysticism and religious experience, religions of India, psychology of religion, women and religion, and ritual studies. She did field research in West Bengal, India, for two years, funded by Fulbright and the American Institute of Indian Studies. She has written three books on Indian religion and recently co-edited a volume on mystical perception. Cuong T. Mai specializes in the history of Chinese and Vietnamese Buddhism, with an emphasis on the comparative history of the social and cultural construction of religious representations and practices of the afterlife, the dead, and dying. Dr. Mai also conducts research on the early history of Pure Land Buddhism in China, focusing on devotional cults, mortuary practices, and visualization texts. His current project examines the origins of the Avalokiteśvara (Guanyin, Quan Âm) fertility cult in late imperial China and its transmission and domestication in Vietnam through the tale of ‘Quan Âm Thị Kính.’

xii

Contributors

Andréia de Sousa Martins got her Bachelor Degree in Social Communication with emphasis on Journalism (2009), and her Master’s in Anthropology (2013) from the Federal University of Paraíba, Brazil. She has been awarded a Graduate School Scholarship to be able to study the Virtual Wakes in Brazil at the Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath, England. Before starting her PhD in October 2014, Andréia worked as a reporter for a news website (2013–2014) and as a communication advisor for a Human Rights NGO (2009–2014), both in the city of João Pessoa, Brazil. Radikobo Ntsimane is a current researcher at the Department of Arts and Culture for Museum Service at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, School of Religion and Theology. He completed his doctoral studies in the power relations between health seekers and health providers with an emphasis on Christian mission hospitals. Ntsimane has published extensively on subjects including health and healing, mission and colonial history, oral history, and gender studies. David Oualaalou is a former security analyst in Washington, DC. He serves as a consultant, speaker, author, and educator on global affairs and international security. He is the author of The Ambiguous Foreign Policy of the United States toward the Muslim World and Volatile State: Iran in the Nuclear Age. Chikako Ozawa-de Silva is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Emory University. Her research focuses on cross-cultural understandings of health and illness, especially mental illness and well-being, by bringing together Western and Asian (particularly Japanese and Tibetan) perspectives on the mind-body, religion, medicine, and therapy. Her publications include one monograph, Psychotherapy and Religion in Japan: The Japanese Introspection Practice of Naikan (2006), and numerous peer-reviewed articles on psychotherapeutic practice, suicide, the mind-body relationship and Tibetan medicine. Her most recent studies include ethnographic studies of the contemplative practices such as CBCT (Cognitively-based Compassion Training) and their applications in prison and domestic violence contexts. Moisés Park teaches at Baylor University and holds a PhD from UC Davis. His research interests are Latin American literature and film, otherness, and Orientalism. He is author of more than ten articles and book chapters and the book Desire and Generational Conflicts in Contemporary Chilean Narrative and Cinema (2014). Priyanka Ramlakhan is a PhD student of Religion at the University of Florida and specializes in South Asian religion, Caribbean religion, and gender. Mandy Rodgers-Gates is a doctoral student in Theology at Duke Divinity School in Durham, NC. Her research interests include Latin American and U.S. Latinx theologies, ethnography and theology, theological views of suffering and death, and theological education in the Majority world. Marius Rotar is a researcher at ‘1 Decembrie 1918’ University of Alba Iulia, Romania, holds a PhD in History, and is considered a pioneer of death studies in Eastern Europe. He is Chairman of Amurg, the Romanian Cremation Association, and initiated the international conference, Dying and Death in 18th–21st Century Europe (ten editions, 2007–2017). He is the author of History of Modern Cremation in Romania (2014).

xiii

Contributors

Jakob Borrits Sabra is a Danish PhD student in the Department of Architecture and Media Technology at Aalborg University and currently working with The Future Cemetery Project at The University of Bath. His research focuses on the contemporary mediation of death and designing new public and private commemorative spaces, sites, technologies, and practices. He holds a Master’s degree in Architecture and Design with a special focus on digital design for public urban spheres. Sabra teaches Art and Technology, Architecture and Urban Design at Aalborg University, Denmark. Aline Silva Santos is an Architect and Planner. She holds a Master’s in Architecture from the University of São Paulo. She worked as a Landscape Architect from 2008–2012. She was a Professor in the Federal Institute for Education, Science and Technology of Minas Gerais State, and is currently Professor in the Federal Institute of São Paulo – Registro. Ramiro Tau is Professor of Genetic Psychology at the National University of La Plata, Argentina. His main field of study is developmental psychology, and he is currently a researcher at the Jean Piaget Archives (University of Geneva, Switzerland), studying the causal thinking and logic correspondences in the development of the comprehension of human death. Michael J. Thate is currently a visiting scholar in the Départment de Philosophie at the École normale supérieure, Paris. He is also an Humboldtstipendiat with the Institut für antikes Judentum und hellenistische Religionsgeschichte at Tübingen Universität, and Research Associate at Princeton University. Thate is the author of Remembrance of Things Past? (2012) and the forthcoming The Godman and the Sea (2018). He has edited ‘In Christ’ in Paul (2015) with Kevin Vanhoozer and Constantine Campbell; A Life in Parts: Albert Schweitzer in Thought and Action (2016) with James Carleton Paget; and the special issue of Religions on ‘Religion and the Individual: Belief, Practice, and Identity’ (2016) with Douglas Davies. His research interests center around reading questions raised within modern philosophy and those of early Christianity together. His current research project is engaging with the historical representation of the sense of smell in early Christianity and late antiquity. John Troyer is the Director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath. His interdisciplinary research focuses on contemporary memorialization practices, concepts of spatial historiography, and the dead body’s relationship with technology. Dr. Troyer is also a theatre director and installation artist with extensive experience in site-specific performance across the United States and Europe. He is a co-founder of the Death Reference Desk website (www. deathreferencedesk.org) and the Future Cemetery Project (www.futurecemetery.org) and a frequent commentator for the BBC. Renske Visser is a Medical Anthropologist interested in aging, death, dying and bereavement. She recently completed her doctoral studies at the University of Bath in which she researched homemaking in later life. Currently, she is researching the experiences of older people aging in inpatient forensic facilities in the United Kingdom. Nicholas R. Werse is a Part-time Lecturer at Baylor University where he writes on the Hebrew prophetic literature and its reception in subsequent Jewish and Christian literary traditions. He is the author of several peer-reviewed journal articles and invited book chapters.

xiv

Contributors

Renae Wilkinson is a doctoral candidate in the Sociology of Religion program at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Her research focuses on how people are affected by, and respond to, adverse life experiences. She is a native of Portland, OR. Keping Wu is currently an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Sun Yat-sen University. Previously she taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and was a Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. Her main research explores religious and ethnic pluralism in Southwest China, space, urbanization and religious change in Southeast China. Her co-authored book Religion and Charity: The Social Life of Goodness in Chinese Societies was published by Cambridge University Press. Colleen Zori is an Archaeologist and member of the Anthropology Department at Baylor University. She has conducted research on the Inka empire in Southern Peru and northern Chile, and has written extensively on Andean craft production and mortuary practices. Davide M. Zori is Assistant Professor of History and Archaeology in the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core of Baylor University’s Honors College. He is a Medieval Archaeologist with a particular specialization in the Viking Age and the Viking expansion into the North Atlantic. He has led archaeological excavations in Iceland and Italy, where his research methods focus on interdisciplinary integration of archaeology, written texts, and natural sciences.

xv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I want to thank the various contributors in this book; your chapters and perspectives really allowed this book to come together and be realized, and I learned so much from all of you as I read your work. Thanatology is a better field because of all of your insights and valuable contributions. Second, I want to thank Sarah Gore and Rebecca Shillabeer for their editorial guidance and assistance.Thank you, Sarah – this project was massive and your assistance and guidance were invaluable. I was able to work on this project because of several grants. Baylor University’s Honors College provided me with a summer sabbatical that gave me time to work on this project. Thanks to Thomas S. Hibbs for giving me a summer sabbatical to work on this book. Baylor’s Religion department provided me support through a graduate student, whose eyes and minds were essential to the development and editing of the various chapters; Nicholas R. Werse, thank you for your help and the many hours you put in on this book. Thank you, Bill Bellinger and Jim Nogalski for continuing to give me staff support; it has been priceless. The Louisville Institute provided me grant money that helped cover my graduate assistant support, and I am very grateful to them – especially to Don Richter, Keri Liechty, and Pam Collins. It is inspiring to be part of the LI cohort this year, and I am grateful for all I have learned in working with you. Last, I want to say how grateful I am for the informal (yet very much needed and appreciated) guidance of George E. Dickinson and Donald Joralemon. I did not realize when I met you at the Death, Dying and Disposal Conference all those years ago, how integral you two would be to my career. It is to you whom I am dedicating my book, and I am so grateful for your advice, your friendship, and your wisdom.

xvi

PART I

The study of dying, death, and grief An overview

1 INTRODUCTION Candi K. Cann

1  Introduction: a brief overview and the field of thanatology This book is divided into three major sections and the first section, ‘The Study of Dying, Death and Grief: An Overview,’ contains three ‘state of the field’ chapters, examining the subjects of death studies, brain death, and grief from respective experts in each field.The first chapter, written by George E. Dickinson, offers a succinct summary of the advances made in the study of death and dying over the last century in the United States. Dickinson, the author of the primary death and dying textbook1 utilized in death and dying courses across the country, argues that the study of death and dying is expanding as Americans move towards more acceptance of death, and an increase in services for dying as medical breakthroughs prolong not only life, but dying as well. Dickinson argues that the study of death can be categorized into three different time periods/schema, and explains the cultural and social shifts regarding dying, death and grief through these periods. More contemporarily, Dickinson traces the slowly growing emergence of death acceptance and questions what the future of both death and dying will become in the United States. The second chapter in this section, written by medical anthropologist Donald Joralemon, examines various definitions and ethics surrounding brain death and its religious implications in contemporary United States, in ‘Brain Death and the Politics of Religion.’ Through a comparison with other countries, Joralemon examines traditional definitions of brain death and argues that both the definition of brain death and its accompanying medical procedures should apply evenly across states, while courts should refrain from allowing the emphasis on religious freedom to dominate the determination of best practices in medicine. The last chapter in this section is written by Kenneth J. Doka, the current president of the Association of Death Education and Counseling2 and leading expert in the field of grief. In his chapter ‘Understanding Grief:Theoretical Perspectives,’ Doka outlines the arc of grief theory since Kübler-Ross’ seminal book, tracing the trajectory over forty years and examining three important theories impacting current models of grief – Worden’s task model, Stroebe and Schut’s dual-process model, and Neimeyer’s approach to meaning reconstruction. Doka emphasizes the importance of moving away from therapeutic models that emphasize stage theories of grief, adopting instead models that integrate grief into everyday life and acknowledge loss as valuable to life itself. These three chapters provide valuable insight by three of the top leading scholars in the field of death studies and help the budding thanatologist ‘catch up’ with the important work achieved in this area in 3

Candi K. Cann

the last fifty years. I am honored that Dickinson, Joralemon, and Doka agreed to write for this handbook, as they are all so important to the field of death studies and have been instrumental and influential to my own work as a scholar. In examining the history of death studies, important gaps are immediately apparent – much of the work in thanatology up to now has been conducted or written in English-speaking countries and remains highly Anglo in both scope and practice. Additionally, little has been translated from other contexts into English, so that death studies primarily serves as a reflection of itself, with little comparative work to situate important studies and theories within a wider context. It is my hope that the next twenty-nine chapters of this edited collection begin to address this deficit. This book serves as only a beginning – an initial compilation of many interesting and important death, disposal, and afterlife traditions around the world – but I do hope this handbook serves as a beginning to a wider view of death practices and beliefs that move beyond the English-speaking world.

2 Death The second section of the book, ‘Death,’ examines disposal practices around the world, narratives and rhetoric surrounding representations of death, and death as viewed, understood or experienced by children in various cultural settings. Only two of these fourteen chapters are situated in the United States, and this section offers a rich examination of beliefs and practices surrounding death around the world. The first chapter of the section on disposal of the dead around the globe, Chapter 5, ‘Symbolizing Imperial Affiliation in Death: Case Studies from the Inka Empire (ad 1400–1532),’ by Colleen Zori, discusses the ways in which mortuary goods and rituals reflected political affiliation and power under the Inka Empire. Zori examines material culture found in archeological gravesites to uncover the ways in which Inka society often tended to favor the local, or the provincial, over and above the imperial. Marius Rotar’s ‘The Romanian Orthodox Church and Issues of Cremation’ in the sixth chapter similarly discusses identity and corpse disposal as a form of marking (or breaking) social relationships, though his discussion centers around the practice of cremation and religious belief in contemporary Romania. For Rotar, cremation and burial are indicators of not only religious belief, but have serious political implications as well. Death, like life, is a political issue, and how one dies, how the corpse is disposed, and whether or not it is remembered, all reflect one’s social ties and political agency. Renato Cymbalista and Aline Silva Santos continue this examination of political agency in their study of cremation and memorialization in modern-day Brazil, in Chapter 7’s ‘Reframing Sites of the Dead in Brazil.’ They study the ways in which popular memorialization in Brazil’s first crematory and three LGBT memorials reflect issues of class and agency. Cymbalista and Santos argue that popular memorialization operates as a sort of counter-protest to the state, forcing recognition of certain marginalized populations of the living. Chikako Ozawa-de Silva also writes about marginalized populations, though in Japan, in Chapter 8, ‘Stand By Me: The Fear of Solitary Death and the Need for Social Bonds in Contemporary Japan.’ She argues that the increased solitude of modern life in Japan has created anxiety about dying alone, leading to problems in Japanese society with group suicide. Ozawa-de Silva writes that changing medical practices (such as organ donation, living wills, etc.) partly reflect the cultural move from familial ownership over disposal practices, and dying itself. Priyanka Ramlakhan’s chapter (Chapter 9), ‘Politics of Death and Mortuary Rituals in Trinidadian Hinduism,’ furthers the exploration of the political importance and cultural implications of disposal practices. Ramlakhan argues that Trinidadians gradually included cremation and other aspects of Hindu corpse disposal in reaction to their colonization by the British in a desire for independent political agency. By tracing 4

Introduction

disposal practices and grieving rituals in Trinidad under colonialism to the present day, Ramlakhan illustrates the importance of death practices as a valuable reflection of personal identity, religious freedom, and political agency. Chapter 10, Jakob Borrits Sabra and John Troyer’s chapter on ‘The Right to be Dead: Designing Future Cemeteries,’ moves the reader to the future of death disposal, describing a grant project centered on the hybridization of traditional English cemeteries and future death technologies. This chapter asks important questions regarding the disposal of bodies and the data that accompany them. Centering on the management of what Sabra and Troyer describe as ‘death infrastructures,’ the Future Cemetery needs to accommodate a growing global population, a simultaneous land shortage (particularly in regards to accommodating the dead), and the accompanying infrastructure issues these bring. In short, Future Cemeteries need to be self-sustainable and energy-efficient, and somehow reduce land-demands for the disposal of the dead. In response to these criteria, Columbia University’s DeathLAB’s proposal, the Sylvan Constellation, proposed a solution that utilizes the bio-mass of the dead, themselves, to power an ongoing self-sustainable light memorial as a way to both honor and dispose of the dead. From the tombs of the Inka in South America to the Future Cemetery of the United Kingdom, disposal practices reveal political agency, cultural values and norms, social relationships and currency, religious beliefs and their importance, and the role of the individual with the state. As land shortages continue and technology continues to evolve and change, it will be important for death scholars to continue to study different disposal practices. The following five chapters center around the rhetoric and narrative surrounding conceptions of death and the ways in which death and mourning construct meaning. Moisés Park writes in Chapter 11, ‘Post Mortem (2010): Saint Salvador Allende and Historical Autopsy,’ about the many narratives surrounding the death of former Chilean president Salvador Allende through an analysis that examines a documentary made about the autopsy of Allende’s corpse. Park asks questions regarding the purpose and ultimate aims of an autopsy, and the ways in which the death can become politicized through both medical examination and media interpretations and portrayal. Park suggests that the private nature surrounding death in contemporary culture (as illustrated by Allende’s death) necessitates medical affirmation and intervention regarding the circumstances surrounding death, which then creates a double narrative that inadvertently reinforces the divide between public and private. Steven G. Jug, in Chapter 12’s ‘Mourning Deaths and Constructing Afterlives in the Red Army at War,’ also examines the ways in which cultural contexts influence and shift beliefs regarding death. Jug writes that Russian soldiers in the Soviet Army who regularly experienced combat death often felt they had no agency in how they and their comrades died, and in response to this lack of agency, found solace in seeking revenge against their enemies, writing condolence letters to the families of soldiers who had died, and mourning in scripted soldier funerals. Jug’s observations examine the intersection of gender and its role in establishing cultural norms, within the realm of military culture in the Soviet Union, challenging traditional depictions of masculinities of mourning in the narratives of soldiers regarding death and grief. Continuing the exploration of mourning in narratives, in Chapter 13, ‘Corpses That Preach: Óscar Romero and the Martyred Priests of El Salvador,’ Mandy RodgersGates juxtaposes the death of El Salvador’s Archbishop Óscar Romero with sermons he gave at the funerals of other murdered Salvadorean priests during his lifetime. Rodgers-Gates argues that Romero presented the priests as both victims and victors, and ultimately, Christian martyrs that serve as models for the living in a violent world. For Rodgers-Gates, the importance of rescripting the violent deaths of these priests offers not only a religious framing of the death, but also a critique of the society in El Salvador, which continues to largely remain silent on these murders. 5

Candi K. Cann

In contrast to the religious afterlife shaped by a martyrological death, Mathew A. Crawford examines the role of photography in creating imagined visual afterlives for the dead in Chapter 14’s ‘Photographing Human Finitude: Philosophical Reflections on Photographs of Death.’ He investigates the life of Susan Sontag through a series of photographs by Annie Leibowitz and ultimately asserts that photography of the dead is not voyeurism, but an extension of the beauty of photography itself – that in its permanence, it provides a kind of alternate afterlife and response to life’s impermanence. In the modern age and particularly in the United States and United Kingdom, many people have no exposure to death or dying. The dying are often cordoned off in hospitals, which have restricted visitation and times, and when someone dies, their corpse is transferred to the morgue or transported to a funeral home. As a result, the image of dying and death frequently becomes the only interaction which the living have with the dead – the spectacle of death preserved on celluloid, made permanent when the body is spirited away. Conversely, Lacy K. Crocker Papadakis’s chapter (Chapter 15) ‘De Imago to Word: The Exile of the Dead from Parish Symbolism in Reformation England’ excavates the origins of contemporary society’s aversion to images of dying and death, exploring the Protestant church of England’s removal of art forms related to death and dying (particularly the Passion of Christ, Mary, and the saints) and its gradual shift to words rather than art. This shift from visual mediums to word-based mediums in the Protestant church mirrored the exile of death and a shift to rhetoric on the afterlife, which continues to be found today in contemporary Western society. The last section in ‘Death’ consists of three chapters studying the intersection between youth and death. While there has been some work on the intersection of children and death, it largely remains a taboo subject, and studies are rare, but work on children and death in different cultures is nearly non-existent. In Chapter 16, Ramiro Tau, a Professor of Psychology in Argentina, examines ‘The Comprehension of Death and Afterlife in Children.’ He finds that children in Argentina between the ages of 5 and 10 have a polyphasic understanding regarding the nature of death and can largely distinguish between the death of material matter versus death of a spiritual or metaphysical realm. Tau’s findings demonstrate the cognitive perceptions of children in regards to death and beliefs in the afterlife, and shed light on biological interpretations versus cultural ones. Also interested in the understanding of death in children and the implications of early parental death, Renae Wilkinson’s work in Chapter 17 explores grief among youth who have experienced parental loss, and how these losses have impacted religiosity. In ‘The Effects of Parental Death on Religiosity within an American Context,’ Wilkinson finds that early parental loss causes a positive correlation between grief and religious affiliation, prayer, and religious salience. However, when examined in light of gender, Wilkinson also found that young women who experienced parental loss were more likely to experience higher indicators of religiosity, while young men demonstrated lower indicators. These early findings indicate the need for broader samples regarding not only the study of grief in different stages of life, but in gender as well. Renske Visser’s ‘Ashes to Ashes: Continuing Bonds in Young Adulthood in the Netherlands,’ (Chapter 18) completes the section on youth and death, examining continuing bonds3 theory in relation to cremation and the distribution/disposal of corpses as cremains. First giving a brief history of Dutch cremation practices,Visser further examines different ways of contemporarily dealing with cremains in the Netherlands.Visser identifies two major ones: the practice of keeping the cremains together and placing them in an object such as an urn, and the division amongst various mourners of the ashes into smaller containers, necklaces, and other various instruments. Last, Visser explores more innovative and unusual ways of distributing cremains, such as in memorial tattoos (mixing the ashes with tattoo ink to be inked onto the body in a tattoo). Visser hopes that these new and innovative ways of memorializing with, and disposing

6

Introduction

of, cremains might reveal a Dutch society ready to embrace continuing bonds theory and the willingness to more openly discuss and think about death and grief.

3 Afterlife The second half of the book centers on various afterlife constructions around the world, from heavens to hells, ghosts to digital avatars, and everything in between. While traditional afterlives (heavens and hells) are commonly discussed, this section is a valuable contribution to thanatological studies, as it examines unusual afterlives. Michael J. Thate’s chapter, Chapter 19, ‘Exeunt: The Question of Suicide at the Origin of Early Christianity,’ opens this section. This chapter could easily have fit in the section on Death as it deals with dying, and ethical issues regarding suicide, but I placed it in this section on afterlives because suicide and views of self-killing are in part defined by social and religious understandings of what happens when one decides to take one’s life. In other words, the religious stance (here, the Christian view) made regarding suicide and its outcomes are, in fact, shaped by the ways in which one perceives the function and role of the afterlife as a measure of a life well-lived. Thate examines early Christian views regarding suicide and voluntary martyrdom, arriving to the conclusion that suicide’s history in Christian thought in part reflects Christianity’s wider ambiguity regarding bodies. Thate postulates, ‘We are not quite sure what bodies are – where they begin and end; what they can do and for what they can be held accountable’ (p. 237). Cuong T. Mai also argues for an embodied analysis in his chapter on martyr suicides and malevolent ghosts in Vietnam in Chapter 20, ‘How Not to Become A Ghost: Tales of Female Suicide Martyrs in Sixteenth-Century Vietnamese ‘Transmissions of Marvels’ (truyeˆ`n kỳ).’ Unlike Thate’s analysis of early Christianity, though, the outcome in Vietnamese Buddhism makes a distinction between suicide and martyr-suicides, in which the virtuous martyr represents ‘suicide done right, self-inflicted death redeemed and rewarded’ (p. 253). Suicide deaths in Vietnam, when done for the ‘right’ reasons, allow the deceased not to simply have a good afterlife, but to possibly become a deity themselves (though ‘bad’ suicides often become malevolent ghosts). This is indeed a marked contrast from suicide deaths in Christianity. Sara Knox’s chapter continues the discussion of ghosts in Chapter 21, ‘The Cat Came Back: Revenant Pets and the Paranormal Everyday,’ though her chapter is the only one to discuss animal/pet death and their interesting afterlives as spirit apparitions. Knox studies postings on internet chatrooms and concludes that animal ghost stories are shared online as a form of mutual support and consolation following pet loss. Her chapter points to the need for further study on the intersection of popular culture and death, as formal (and publicly professed) belief sometimes contradicts everyday popular expressions found online and in conversation. Her work also demonstrates the ways in which the internet is used as a primary medium for grief work, revealing the importance of studying technology as a therapeutic medium for processing death and expressing grief. Jenny Huberman’s chapter, ‘From Ancestors to Avatars: Transfiguring the Afterlife’ (Chapter 22) examines technology as a different type of afterlife – through the transhumanist practice of ‘mind cloning’ through avatars. Avatars are essentially virtual interpretations of the self that are created by uploading a set of rules (in this case, rules would be things like facial tics, individual quirks, certain manners of speaking, etc.) to a computer database that then becomes refined through heavy interaction between the user and the computer. The person has then created a virtual ‘avatar’ or copy of the self that stays in the virtual world and can mimic the thought processes, language, and, ultimately, the decisions of the person who uploaded them. Currently, the transhumanist movement touts these avatars as a way to maintain ‘life’ even after

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one is dead. Huberman examines the transhumanist movement and the avatar process, and concludes that afterlife constructions are shaped by the society and culture from which they emerge. The last half of the ‘Afterlife’ section of the book centers on various religious and cultural interpretations of death around the world. This section is meant to inform the thanatologist regarding the ways in which afterlife conceptions inform and influence disposal traditions. Chapter 23, by June McDaniel studies Hindu conceptions of the afterlife in her chapter, ‘From the Underworld of Yama to the Island of Gems: Concepts of Afterlife in Hinduism.’ McDaniel notes that the Hindu worldview of samsara and reincarnation informs the desire to reach moksha, or liberation from the endless cycle of birth, death, rebirth, and then re-death.To be re-born in the Hindu context is to also re-die. McDaniel then describes the world of Hindu deities and the ways in which they influence conceptions of death, culminating with a rich description of Hindu corpse rituals and the embodied practice of encountering both the divine and death. In Chapter 24, ‘A Broad Survey of Zulu Ancestor Veneration and the Challenges It Faces,’ Radikobo Ntsimane describes Zulu ancestor practices found in South Africa, exploring some of the contemporary issues facing South Africans today, as traditional cultural practices are threatened by urbanization and industrialization. For Zulus, ghosts are an everyday reality, and ancestor veneration and propitiation an important part of the African cosmology. Relationships between the living and the dead are maintained through regular consultation of shamans, and regular rituals for the dead. Keping Wu’s chapter on ‘Death and Life in a Pluralistic Society: BoundaryMaking and Boundary-Crossing in Sino-Burmese-Tibetan Borderlands’ (Chapter 25) also notes the importance of both community shamans and observing rituals for the dead in order to keep the more dangerous or unwelcome spirits and ghosts at bay. Through extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Wu outlines the pluralistic and multi-religious networks found in the Chinese township of Bingzhongluo, examining the differences in various religious rituals for the dead and the ways in which these rites connote local identity. For example, Protestants don’t drink alcohol, and thus their presence can be marked at funerals by a lack of social drinking, while other groups utilize alcohol as an essential part of their funerary traditions. Wu concludes her study finding that in Bingzhongluo, death rituals are boundary-making as well as boundary-crossing, and ultimately, death helps create a more pluralistic and multi-ethnic social order as villagers participate in each other’s funeral rites. Davide M. Zori’s chapter on ‘Viking Death: Pre-Christian Rites of Passage and Funerary Feasting’ (Chapter 26) examines Scandinavian burial rites in regards to food and alcohol, finding that food and drink represent hospitality exchanges revealing the interdependent relationships between the realms of the living and the dead. These rites also unveil a potent liminal world where the dead are viewed as dangerous for the living, leaving ghosts to roam the earth and haunt the living. The Viking afterlife thus offered several alternate (and sometimes competing) visions for what happened once one died, with burial rites aimed towards the desired destination. Like the Vikings’ varied afterlives, Nicholas R. Werse writes that Judaism also had no consistent or unified understanding of what happened when one dies. In Chapter 27, ‘Death, Resurrection, and the World to Come: Jewish Views on Death and the Afterlife,’ Werse discusses developments in Judaism in five different eras of Jewish thought from Biblical Judaism to contemporary Judaism, and concludes that though there is a wide range of what Jews actually believe in terms of the afterlife, all of them agree that the afterlife serves as either a reward or punishment for deeds done during one’s life. David Oualaalou continues the exploration of judgment as central to an afterlife in Chapter 28, ‘The Afterlife and Death: An Islamic Perspective.’ Oualaalou writes that Muslim afterlife conceptions influence burial traditions, and the ways in which families of the deceased interact with the dead, in acts such as washing and praying for the deceased. 8

Introduction

The last two chapters in this final section return the reader to a thoughtful exploration of contemporary disposal traditions in the Christian tradition, the first in Latin America and the second in North America. Andréia de Sousa Martins’ chapter on Brazilian funerals, ‘Coffins, Candles, and Cameras: Aspects of Brazilian Funerals from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-first Century’ (Chapter 29) describes the transformation of Brazilian wakes and the afterlives of corpses from highly religious and public affairs to small, private, and individualized ceremonies that hinge on close social networks and kinship affiliation. Recently, though, a new tradition has emerged in which wakes are televised through cameras and the internet, reviving the public spectacle of wakes more popular in the 1800s, and now including strangers and voyeurs through the internet. Chapter 30, ‘Buying an Afterlife: Mapping Religious Beliefs through Consumer Death Goods,’ argues that many of the popular disposal practices currently practiced in the United States may be seen as religious choices but are, in fact, perpetuated by the funeral industry’s emphasis on bodies as unhygienic and polluting. Consumer choices are often determined by imagined embodiment and are determined in part by non-rational consumer choices based on religious upbringing and belief, and reinforcing diasporic and religious identity. Afterlives – whether traditional, strange, imagined, technological, or always changing – all reflect humanity’s attachment to life and living. We cannot imagine ourselves not living, and since we have never experienced death – except through the death of others, or rarely, because of medical intervention – it is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine that life does not go on. Afterlives can function, then, as post-lives and imagined judgment for injustices suffered in life. But they can also serve as reminders in this life of the dead still roaming amongst us.

4  Conclusion: future directions It is my hope that this book, with its many non-Western contributions, will serve as an initial impetus for thanatology scholars to revisit their work, resituating it within a broader comparative and global context. I believe that thanatologists cannot make broad conclusions regarding dying, death, and grief unless we have looked beyond our own cultural limitations and frameworks, and examined our work in light of various cultures and belief systems. Additionally, much of the work in thanatology has been, and continues to be, shaped by dominant discourses of power, whether it be gender, privilege, class, race, or geography, and though these biases are now being recognized, much work remains to be done to offer a corrective. Ultimately, it is my hope that you, the reader, will join the important work that remains to be done in thanatology, as it is through the study of death that we often find what is valued in life.

Notes 1 Leming, M. R. and Dickinson, G. E., 2010. Understanding Dying, Death, and Bereavement. Cengage Learning. 2 See www.adec.org/ for more on ADEC. They are the premier association in the United States on death education, and also issue certification for thanatology. 3 Dennis Klass argues that continuing bonds theory helps maintain the relationship between the bereaved and the deceased, allowing the griever to process their grief through re-connecting with the dead in their new state as deceased. For more on continuing bonds theory, see Klass, D., Silverman, P. R. and Nickman, S. eds., 2014. Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief.  Taylor & Francis.

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2 STATE OF THE FIELD OF DEATH IN THE UNITED STATES George E. Dickinson

1 Introduction When Bob Dylan wailed that times were changing back in the 1960s, he was not necessarily talking about dying and death, yet his assertion certainly applies. In the twenty-first century we no longer bury our dead in private cemeteries on the farm but depend on professionals to handle the final disposition of dead human remains for us. From an agrarian state to an industrialized one, we have specialization which functions in most aspects of our lives. Like medicalization by the medical community in telling us what indeed is an illness and what is not, funeralization by the funeral industry dictates options in body disposal. Death has become ‘bureaucratized,’ as noted by Robert Blauner (1966) over half a century ago. Death is institutionalized today. Following the event of death, the body is taken away, not to be seen again until prepared by a mortician and lying in a casket or else not seen again as cremation only leaves a few pounds of unrecognizable cremains. A first characterization of ‘medicalized death’ is that it happens in a hospital, noted Philippe Ariès in his classic work The Hour of Our Death (1981). Complaints about ‘medicalization’ of dying and death came to the forefront in the last third of the twentieth century, as individuals reported that they did not wish to die in the hospital hooked up to a lot of machinery (Verhey, 2011). These challenges grew into movements – the movement for patient rights, the death awareness movement, and the hospice movement. The Karen Quinlan case in 1975, when her parents won the court battle to remove her from a respirator and ‘let her die,’ certainly brought the whole issue of the right to die into the media. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the fabric regarding dying and death is shifting with a slight trend toward deinstitutionalization: natural childbirth (often at home with a midwife), working out of one’s home (thanks to computers), homeschooling, dying at home (home hospice), home funerals (do-it-yourself, legal in forty-one states), and roadside memorials without the restrictions of cemetery rulings. While these examples are not overwhelming and occur mostly in a minority of situations, the shift is there. Will the trend in death and dying continue, or will it only be a fad temporarily involving small numbers of individuals?

2  Historical periods of death and bereavement Some historians, such as James Farrell (1980), have divided the American experience of death into three major shifts, dating back to the 1600s. From 1600 to 1830 ‘the living death’ period 10

State of the field of death in the U.S.

existed. This was a time when cemeteries were in the city by the church and served as constant reminders of death. As one walked through the village or went to worship on Sunday, she/he was made aware of death. Many children were born but did not survive childhood, as the infant mortality rate in this era was extremely high. Death was painful and was considered to be a punishment for sin. A belief in fatalism and that a sovereign God was in control thus indicating that whatever happened was meant to be was a prevalent theme of this time period. These individuals were living with death. ‘The dying of death’ period was from 1830 to 1945. This was a time when funeral homes came into existence in the 1890s in New York City. The idea promoted by funeral homes was one of beautifying the dead human remains and making the body look alive through the skills of embalmers. Death was thought of as simply ‘going to sleep.’The dead remains lying in the casket looked as if the deceased was only sleeping. After all, the body was reclining on a mattress with the head resting on a pillow.The room in which the bodies were displayed for a viewing or wake was at the time referred to as the slumber room.The place where the body was taken to be buried was called a cemetery (from the Greek meaning sleeping place). Burial plots were marked, using sandstone or slate, with a headboard and a footboard, linked by sideboards like a bed. Married couples rested in a double bed. The use of morphine and ether during this time lessened the pain of death. The rise of the middle class advocated death with order, with the ideology of separate spheres. These spheres included separating management from labor, men’s work from the home, women’s work from men’s work, the funeral from the home, and the cemetery from the city (out of sight, out of mind). Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, MA, developed in 1831, was the first rural (out of the city) landscaped cemetery designed for its natural beauty and a place where families could gather for a picnic near Grandpa’s grave on a Sunday afternoon. Such rural locations developed all over the United States, outside the city. Death was made so artistic that it almost became artificial and thus less fearful (Leming and Dickinson, 2016). ‘The resurrection of death’ period from 1945 to the present was ushered in by dropping the atomic bombs on Japan, killing tens of thousands of individuals. Such large masses of individuals being killed almost instantly by terrorist attacks around the world reinforced the ‘resurrection of death.’ The ‘God is dead’ theology emerged in the 1960s. The threat of ‘megadeath’ became a constant reminder of the fragility of life and the uncertainty of existence.With the sophistication of mass media in the twenty-first century, such horrendous sudden deaths of individuals reveal a much-too-vivid reminder to us of the uncertainty of death.

3  The evolution of the process of dying Not unlike the event of death itself, the process of dying has changed in recent decades in the United States. Acute illnesses from infectious diseases such as pneumonia, diphtheria, and tuberculosis, common in 1900, have been largely replaced by chronic illnesses like heart disease and cancer which tend to occur late in life. We die lingering deaths today, thus the need for institutionalized dying such as nursing homes and hospitals. Nineteenth-century deaths were more public and out in the open, yet became more ‘invisible’ in the late nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries (Ariès, 1981). Philippe Ariès observed that with increased individualism in the twentieth century, an increasing anxiety about dying well emerged with the ‘art of dying’ responsibilities falling on individuals and the community. He stated that with professionals controlling the organization of dying, the twentieth century ruined the ‘beautiful death’ (or the ‘good death’) by making it invisible and forbidden. Yet, Julie-Marie Strange (2009) argues that most historians acknowledge that the good death was actually an ideal. Gone largely are the days when Grandpa died at home in his own bed surrounded by family. Sociologist Deborah 11

George E. Dickinson

Carr (2012) suggests that in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries death has again become visible, as patients and families tend to have more autonomy in determining the outcome of their illnesses. With advancements in medical science, we are living longer and perhaps sometimes beyond the timeframe in which human bodies were made to live. As Yale University Professor of Surgery Sherwin Nuland (1993: p. 265) admits, ‘We live today in the era not of the art of dying, but of the art of saving life.’ Social death often precedes biological death, as the individual is medically alive, yet not aware, often due to life prolongation from modern medicine.With infant mortality rates plummeting in recent years in the United States, we typically think of dying as something that happens in the Medicare-eligible years, which is largely true. Carr (2012) observed that the epidemiology of death has changed with lifestyle-related or human made diseases having replaced infectious diseases as the leading causes of death. These epidemiologic shifts have corresponded in cultural beliefs about risks and mortality. The widespread occurrence of infectious diseases and epidemics created a ‘shared sense of vulnerability’ believed to be beyond the individual’s control, notes Carr (p. 186). Health risks today, however, are seen more as acquired from one’s own behaviors and choices, all of which is enforced through media and various sources informing us of the proper way to live to avoid the risk of death. Sociologists Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss (1971) suggested that dying is a ‘trajectory’ or ‘status passage.’ Dying became a process or paradigm from living person to dead person, a model by which caregivers could have some structure to the process prior to the event of death, a sort of rite of passage, notes Allan Kellehear (2009). Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages of the dying process (1969) and Glaser and Strauss’ four awareness contexts when dying (1965) are wellknown examples of such stage theories. Though such theories suggest how individuals are supposed to die, in reality such a pattern is not always followed – theory and reality are not always one and the same. As philosopher Geoffrey Scarre (2009: p. 149) reminds us, ‘Death is universal, dying is not universal.’ Each individual’s death is somewhat unique to that person (whether following a stage theory or not), yet the event of death is universal (though the definitions of ‘dead’ are not universal). Dying is one of the most individual things that can happen to the body and this takes place exclusively within the skin of that one individual. The dying process in itself, however, is one of the most social experiences that one can have, as all humans exist within a social and cultural context. An act of dying is a social or shared event (Leming and Dickinson, 2016). A contemporary major shift in the way dying and death is viewed no doubt is reflected in the fact that the Baby Boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964) have reached the age of retirement and are beginning to experience a higher rate of cohort deaths as they are reaching the 65-year-old-plus age category.These individuals are not experiencing death at the same rate of their ancestors, thus ‘the living death’ stage is somewhat foreign to them.They are demanding more meaningful deaths and disposals, all the while with a sense of autonomy. Funeral directors in the twenty-first century will do whatever a family wishes as long as it is ethically and legally okay. Individualization overall is alive and well in body disposition in the twenty-first century.

4  Changing options for body disposition Earth burial has been the choice of final disposition for most people throughout the history of the United States, yet cremation is rapidly gaining popularity and is up from 10% in the 1970s to 50.2% in 2015 (Cremation Association of North America, 2018).The National Funeral Directors Association projects that by the year 2030 cremation rates will top 70% nationwide (Sanburn, 12

State of the field of death in the U.S.

2016). Cremation is more environmentally correct than earth burial, as embalming fluid is a carcinogen (a more environmentally friendly green embalming fluid is now available, however, not often used). As cremation is a final form of disposition, no requirement exists for cremains to be kept, though some individuals opt to bury them, put them in a vase, place them in a painting, put them in orbit, insert them in an Eternal Reef (a concrete artificial reef in the ocean which forms ‘apartments’ for fish, somewhat like a large whiffle ball), or place them in a bracelet or necklace to carry deceased loved ones around with them. Increased interest in cremation could suggest that the body is no longer the sacred object that it once was thought to be. A majority of Americans believe in an afterlife, but only 26% think that they will have bodies in heaven, with 30% believing in reincarnation (Miller, 2010). Green burials are available today whereby a body is buried without being embalmed, simply wrapped in a shroud and placed in the ground in a biodegradable casket or without a container. Green burials honor the idea of ‘dust to dust’ (Basler, 2004). Though currently forbidden by Italian law, the concept of burial pods in Italy gives another twist on green funerals whereby the body is placed in a fetal position in an egg-shaped burial pod made from biodegradable starch plastic as the coffin and buried in the ground. A tree (or tree seed) is then planted over the top of the pod and will use the nutrients from the decomposing body as fertilizer for growth (Markham, 2014). Another environmentally friendly way of disposing of dead human remains includes composting the dead via a rapid process using liquid nitrogen, then after some 6 months using the compost as potting soil (Frank, 2001). Bodies can also be dissolved in lye and flushed down the drain through a process called alkaline hydrolysis, somewhat like a large pressure cooker originally developed to dispose of animal carcasses (Love, 2008).

5  A death-denying society? While somewhat controversial, the idea that the United States is a death-denying society still somewhat exists today, though perhaps a trend is away from denial. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book entitled The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker (1973) argued that fear and denial of death are basic dynamics for everyone. As noted earlier, we do not die in the United States, we simply go to sleep. Rather than state that someone has died, we often use euphemisms (e.g. passed away, did not survive, fought a hard battle but in the end did not ‘make it,’ bit the dust, departed this life, croaked, kicked the bucket, is six feet under, is pushing up daisies, and called home by God). Indeed, it is difficult to use the word ‘died,’ if you are telling someone about a death. We often choke up when trying to get out the word died, thus a euphemism makes it a bit easier. On the one hand, it could be suggested that such a word substitution shows denial; but on the other hand, euphemisms make it easier to pass on bad news by couching the word. We tend to avoid death conversations. Perhaps it is the uneasiness of such talk and not knowing what to say for fearing we will say the wrong thing. Jokes about death and sex are often told, suggesting our anxiety about these topics. Being uneasy about a topic opens us up to kid about it, covering up our anxiety. British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer’s essay entitled ‘The Pornography of Death’ (1955) argued that death replaced sex as contemporary society’s major taboo topic. As death in the community was rarer than in earlier times and with individuals actually seeing fewer corpses, a relatively realistic view of death was replaced by a voyeuristic, adolescent preoccupation with it, suggested Gorer. Avoidance is a good defense mechanism for something that is feared. By not talking about death, maybe it will go away, or so it may seem to some. If we do not talk about sex with our children, then maybe they will not do it.This argument holds for death conservations with children. If we avoid the topic, then death will not happen. Two highly read books out of the 1960s, however, Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death (1963) 13

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and Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ On Death and Dying (1969), both made Americans re-think their taboo on death and realize that talking about dying and death might not be a bad thing after all. Kübler-Ross noted that a confrontation with death can enrich a life and help an individual to be more human and humane. Kübler-Ross’ work was very successful in reaching a large audience, thus helping to jump-start the death awareness movement. Perhaps one of the best examples of death denial is cryonics (body freezing). The person’s body is frozen in dry ice and liquid nitrogen with the hope that someday a cure will develop for the ‘deceased’ individual so that the body will be treated with the cure, thawed out, resurrected, and will then live happily ever after. American baseball great Ted Williams’ death was recently highlighted in the media because of a flap among his children as to whether his body should be cremated or frozen (fried or frozen?).The dilemma was finally settled in the courts which opted for cryonics.The whole idea of cryonics suggests that we do not die but are simply frozen. Upon awakening, one will likely have a hangover and one of the worst headaches ever and be totally uninformed about technological and other cultural changes during the lengthy frozen state. Cryonics is prohibitively expensive for most individuals, and it lacks any guarantee of thawing out and returning to the world of the living. Though death conversations are traditionally often avoided, a new trend in the twenty-first century is trying to bring the topic ‘out of the closet’ and into the room. Death cafes are cropping up. Having had a long-standing tradition in Switzerland, death cafes have now migrated to Great Britain (in 2011) and to the United States (in 2012; Ward, 2013). Not meant to be a grief or therapy group, but the idea is to increase awareness and make the most of our finite lives. Such cafes schedule regular times and events in which the topic of conversation at the café will be limited to death talk – what are your ideas about death or your options for body disposal? Also death dinners are emerging in the United States as guests are invited to your home for dinner and the topic of table conversation will be about death. Donald Joralemon in Mortal Dilemmas (2016) argues that social and biological death have played a role in the shift away from denial as individuals today can slowly disengage from society sometimes long before their actual death. Social death often takes place before biological death, therefore elaborate rituals following the death are not as often required. Additionally, Joralemon uses the proliferation of new memorials to demonstrate why he believes we are not such a death-denying society – memorial car decals, tattoos of the deceased, and mourning sites such as roadside memorials. We tend to be more apt than ever before to try to keep individuals alive, even if just in memory. As Candi K. Cann (2014: p. 16) notes, ‘Memorials function as replacements for the body,’ as we are unable to keep the body, thus are memorialized in ‘material remembrance.’

6  Increased interest in dying and death Unless one has been in a comatose state for a number of years (cryonics perhaps?), she or he is well aware of increased interest through television and movies of dying and death. Prior to the 1970s few movies dealt with the death of a main character, but more recently movies have a theme with a principal actor dying. The same is true of television with series like Six Feet Under and Family Plots showing viewers the everyday life within funeral homes.The mysteries enclosed within a funeral home venue are revealed to the public, as these professionals help to make grief following a death somewhat more manageable. Such an interest via media has perhaps contributed to more death talk, as with the death cafes and dinners. Thanatology (the study of death) emerged in the 1970s and is now rather commonly found in colleges and universities throughout the United States as well as in healthcare professional 14

State of the field of death in the U.S.

programs (e.g. medical schools, nursing schools, and social work schools). While largely located in psychology departments in colleges, death and dying offerings are also found in numerous other social and behavioral science curricula. Individuals began to write about dying and death, thus the discipline of thanatology emerged. Certainly this newly formed academic discipline created more interest in the topic of dying and death.Two United States journals emerged in the 1970s with the topic of dying and death: Omega and Death Studies. Thus, with academic offerings on the topic of death and with journals and books coming out, the interest began to climb. We are living longer in the twenty-first century, as compared to earlier centuries. What then to do with an elderly, ailing family member needing care 24–7? The last century has seen a tremendous growth in nursing homes and facilities for assisted living. This rise of end of life institutions correlates with the earlier discussion of institutionalization in the twenty-first century in the United States and of Grandpa rarely dying at home surrounded by family. Some 80% of individuals dying in the United States today die in an institutionalized setting (hospital, nursing home, assisted living facility, and freestanding hospice). Therefore, with this dying away from home ‘movement,’ Grandpa is dying in a mysterious place removed from living family members, such as a hospital. As one little boy was overheard to say, ‘I don’t want to go to the hospital because that is where you go to die.’ Grandpa became ill, went to the hospital, and next was seen lying in a casket with his eyes closed and sometimes with his glasses on. Thus, there is some mystery or intrigue about this clandestine place called a hospital. The child’s interest in this series of events is spiked. Recent biomedical breakthroughs such as organ and tissue transplants have stimulated interest in the whole dying process. Beginning with Dr. Christian Bernard’s first human heart transplant in South Africa in the 1960s, the idea of prolonging life through medical intervention has suggested that modern medicine has all the remedies so that we may live forever. Almost annually, cures for various ailments are developed, thus creating talk and interest about the miracles of modern medicine.

7  How we arrived at the current state of the field of death in the United States As noted earlier, with modernization and mobility, families are more split, resulting in society becoming more individualized. Funerals and gravestones are more personalized today. Cookie-cutter, prefabricated funeral home offerings are being replaced by customized burials and memorials (Rybarski, 2004). Preplanned funerals are encouraged today and tend to lessen decision-making by the family following a death. With mainstream religious affiliations declining, a more secular view of the world is emerging, making traditional religious rituals such as funerals and earth burials less attractive (Dickinson, 2012). The thought that cremation is the ultimate desecration of the body has perhaps lost some of its luster, as evidenced by the Roman Catholic Church dropping its opposition late in the twentieth century. Stephen Prothero (2010) argues that the rise in cremation is related to a growing disregard for the doctrine of resurrection. Formal religion may no longer satisfy needs in a secular society. As sociologist Michael Kearl (1989: p. 194) observed, ‘In a society that views this world as the net totality of existence and in a desire to break from Christian tradition, death has become an alien intruder, disrupting the satisfactions of the here and now.’ Individuals today are following the advice of Frank Sinatra’s song:‘Do it my way.’ Legalization of physician-assisted suicide (PAS), now in Oregon, Washington, California, Montana,Vermont, and Colorado, reveals the self-autonomy of today. Individuals want to control not only how but when they die. Whether they carry out the physician-assisted suicide or not, just to have that 15

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control, the right to do it, serves as a security blanket if the health situation becomes intolerable. With an emphasis by many individuals on quality of life (versus sanctity of life), the idea of terminating one’s life via PAS is not something that would have been accepted in earlier times. The secularization of society correlates with this changing attitude toward euthanasia, with 70% of Americans favoring the legalization of PAS, according to a recent Gallup Opinion Poll (Saad, 2013). As noted above, the cost of dying likely comes into play when the option of body disposition is earth burial (cost ranges between $8,000 and $10,000) or cremation (average cost hovers around $2,000). It is no wonder then that cremation is surpassing earth burial as a form of final disposition. If one agrees that we are in the ‘resurrection of death’ phase of death and bereavement, individuals are born and raised today ‘in a thanatological context concerned with the imminent possibility of death of the person, the death of humanity, death of the universe, and, by necessary extension, the death of God,’ wrote Edwin Shneidman (1973: p. 189). The fact that nuclear weapons are available to numerous countries puts massive destruction of entire societies in the forefront. Death today surrounds and shapes our very existence. Death is out front today as roadside memorials, dating back to the late twentieth century, placed at the spot where one died beside a road are ubiquitous in the United States. Such memorials are reminders of death as we travel United States highways, not unlike the churchyard cemeteries which existed during the early settlements in colonial America. A roadside memorial is placed where the soul left the body, according to the beliefs of some. This memorial thus marks a sacred place, unlike the cemetery with its institutionalized rules and order.The Internet, via Facebook for example, has contributed to modern openness of grieving. Such a non-faceto-face encounter might make it easier to relate. Cyber solace has allowed for individuals to grieve in private, yet to share grief. Grief shared is grief relieved, yet the sharing can be more impersonal with the Internet. Grief support can come through the Web in the twenty-first century.

8  The future of death in the United States The legalization of physician-assisted suicide will likely continue to increase, as it is now legal in six states beginning with Oregon in 1994. The issue continues to come before the voters in various states at election time. With more chronic, lingering deaths today, as opposed to acute quick deaths in earlier years, hospice (beginning in the 1970s) and palliative care (beginning in the 1980s) are on the rise. The number of euthanasia cases, however, will likely be contained as one’s death can be made easier and with less pain with palliative care. The need, therefore, for euthanasia will perhaps not be as great, as the palliative care and hospice movements continue to spread. With a more secularized society, religion likely will play a lesser role in today’s society, giving the individual the right to determine how and when she or he is to die. In a more secularized society today, with limited rituals, individuals can seek refuge in denial, notes Bryan Appleyard (2013). Yet, Appleyard observes that we seek ritual to celebrate or cope with our rites of passage, seeking a human constant and stability. Such creates a void in the secular worldview that tends to be filled by reclassifying funeral ceremonies as celebrations of a life rather than as occasions to mark the immortality of the soul of the deceased. Was it not French sociologist Emile Durkheim who wrote about the ritual of crying at a funeral being acceptable? Crying is legitimized on such an occasion and is made to be okay. So, we have begun to invent new rituals for the dying process, as religious rituals tend to be fading. One can leave messages on the Internet of the dying or for the bereaved. All are invited to join in, whether you knew

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State of the field of death in the U.S.

the deceased or not. Go on Facebook to share your sympathy. Put up a roadside memorial or place a memorial decal on your car. Let’s join in with the grief! If earth burial is chosen, place a mobile phone in the casket and turn it on. Call the number as the casket is being lowered into the grave – keep in touch! Death is thus validated by becoming a crowd, rather than strictly an individual phenomenon. The suggestion that the All-American ideal way to die is to die at home, sleeping in one’s own bed at night, while having had a good day the day before is not the norm today, but the shift back to dying at home as in earlier centuries is changing somewhat with the hospice movement. For example, the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization (2014) has grown in the United States from serving 158,000 patients in 1985 to 1,113,000 in 2012. Overall, however, the institutionalization of death today is alive and well. Funeral homes and cremation services are overwhelmingly used for body disposition, and death still primarily occurs in institutional settings, not at home. Individualization in all aspects of death is the big change, as ‘having it my way’ is certainly celebrated and advocated. As British sociologist Tony Walter (1999) stated, the signs of death are becoming more visible in the twenty-first century, with more public forms of mourning coming back into fashion, as Ariès had suggested was true in the nineteenth century. With better mass communication today, a disaster anywhere in the world can be reported around the world practically as it is happening. We can now see wars being fought live or the aftermath of terrorist attacks on television from the comfort of our homes. As individuals are more knowledgeable about end of life issues, they are more demanding about their rights, whether regarding euthanasia or funeral practices. The focus previously in traditional medicine has been to prolong life. The twenty-first century with palliative medicine, however, has seen a momentum change from curing to caring. A more humanist bent to medicine is advocated. Such an emphasis should enhance dying for the individual. The rise of the hospice movement parallels this shift. In the 1970s few physicians were telling the patient if she or he was terminally ill, as the American Medical Association left such ‘telling’ to the ‘therapeutic privilege’ of the attending physician. In the 1980s, the AMA reversed their decision and argued that it was the patient’s right to know if she or he had a terminal condition. Such a shift likely began in the 1970s from more demand for consumer rights, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and environmental concerns of the day. Several questions regarding the future of death in the United States are appropriate to ask (Leming and Dickinson, 2016). With chronic illnesses prevailing in the United States today, is the prolonged life of the elderly really worth the thousands of dollars per month to keep one alive in a nursing home? Will drug costs continue to soar or will government regulations cause them to subside? Will an aging individual outlive her or his living expenses during the omega of life? Will Medicare and Medicaid have enough money to cover expenses of those needing such coverage? Should the federal government continue to provide help to those in need, a political football already in the twenty-first century? As our population ages, will the problem only become worse before it gets better? As individuals, we need to think about how we want to live as we are dying. Perhaps ethicist Daniel Callahan in his controversial book Setting Limits: Medical Goals in an Aging Society (1987) was right on target regarding governmental responsibility for the elderly: Maybe we should draw the line regarding life-prolonging decisions with elderly persons. But when we become the elderly, we might have a different opinion! Given the multiple changes in dying, death, and bereavement in the twenty-first century, it all should be a challenge. Let’s hope that we are up to it. Key words: body disposition, history of death, attitudes toward death, future of death

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Further reading Cann, C. (2014) Grieving the Dead in the Twenty-first Century. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Mourning practices are examined in the United States and compared to practices in Asia and Latin America. Erickson, K. A. (2013) How We Die Now. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Written from a sociological perspective, this ethnography gives insight into the complexity of dying from the point of view of nursing assistants who work with the dying. Gawander, A. (2014) Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters at the End of Life. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company. A physician discusses the ups and downs of doctor-patient interactions at the end of life. Green, J. W. (2008) Beyond the Good Death: The Anthropology of Modern Dying. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. The changes in the concept of death over the last several decades are examined, with the conclusion that the attitudes of today’s Baby Boomers differ significantly from those of their parents and grandparents. Joralemon, D. (2016). Mortal Dilemmas: The Troubled Landscape of Death in America. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. An anthropologist highlights end of life issues and presents a nice treatise on the troubled landscape of death in America. Montross, C. (2007) Body of Work: Meditations on Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab. New York: Penguin Press. This poet turned medical doctor gives an uncommon perspective to the emotional difficulty of the gross anatomy lab in medical school.

Bibliography Appleyard, B. (2013) ‘Hi, I’m Just Logging Off for Eternity – Ian Banks’s Online Revelation of His Terminal Illness Reflects How, in a Secular Age, the Net Fulfils [sic] Our Ancient Need for Ritual in Dealing with Death,’ The Sunday Times [London], April 7, p. 2. Ariès, P. (1981) The Hour of Our Death. Translated by H. Weaver. New York City: Alfred A. Knopf. Basler, B. (2004) ‘Green Graveyards – A Natural Way to Go,’ AARP Bulletin, July/August, p. 3. Becker, E. (1973) The Denial of Death. New York: The Free Press. Blauner, R. (1966) ‘Death and Social Structure,’ Psychiatry (Washington, D.C.), 29(4), pp. 378–399. Callahan, D. (1987) Setting Limits: Medical Goals in an Aging Society. New York: Simon and Schuster. Cann, C. (2014) Virtual Afterlives: Grieving the Dead in the Twenty-first Century. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Carr, D. (2012) ‘Death and Dying in the Contemporary United States:What are the Psychological Implications of Anticipated Death?,’ Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 6(2), pp. 184–195. Cremation Association of North America (2018). CANA Annual Statistics Report 2017. Wheeling, IL: CANA. De Vries, P. (1984) Slouching Toward Kalamazoo. New York: Penguin Books. Dickinson, G. (2012) ‘Diversity in Death: Body Disposition and Memorialization,’ Illness, Crisis & Loss, 20(2), pp. 141–157. Farrell, J. (1980) Inventing the American Way of Death. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Frank, L. (2001) ‘Composting the Dead?,’ Science, 293(5528), June 13 [online]. Available at: www.science mag.org/news/2001/06/composting-dead-bodies. [Accessed 11 November 2005]. Glaser, B. and Strauss, A. (1966) Awareness of Dying. Chicago: Aldine. Glaser, B. and Strauss, A. (1971) Status Passage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Gorer, G. (1955) ‘The Pornography of Death,’ Encounter, 5, October, pp. 49–53. Joralemon, D. (2016) Mortal Dilemmas: The Troubled Landscape of Death in America. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Kearl, M. (1989) Endings:The Sociology of Death and Dying. New York: Oxford University Press.

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State of the field of death in the U.S. Kellehear, A. (2009) ‘What the Social and Behavioural Studies say about Dying,’ in: Kellehear, A. (ed). The Study of Dying: From Autonomy to Transformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–26. Kübler-Ross, E. (1969) On Death and Dying. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Leming, M. and Dickinson, G. (2016) Understanding Dying, Death & Bereavement. Stamford, CT: Cengage Publishers. Love, N. (2008) ‘New Idea in Mortuary Science: Dissolving Bodies with Lye,’ Associated Press, May 8. Markham, D. (2014) ‘Egg-shaped Burial Pods Feed the Trees and Turn Cemeteries into Forests,’ Treehugger. com, Living/Culture [online], September 19. Available at: www.treehugger.com/culture/egg-shapedburial-pods-fertilize-forest.html. [Accessed 7 March 2016]. Miller, L. (2010) ‘Far from Haven,’ Newsweek, 155(14), 5 April, pp. 56–57. Mitford, J. (1963) The American Way of Death. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publishers. National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization (2014) NHPCO Facts and Figures: Pediatric Palliative & Hospice Care in America, 2014 edition. Nuland, S. (1993) How We Die. London: Chatto & Windus. Prothero, S. (2010) God Is Not One. New York: HarperCollins. Rybarski, M. (2004) ‘Boomers After All is Said and Done,’ American Demographics, 26(5), 1 June, pp. 32–34. Saad, L. (2013) ‘U.S. Support for Euthanasia Hinges on How It’s Described: Support Is at Low Ebb on the Basis of Wording that Mentions “Suicide,” ’ Gallup News [online], 29 May. Available at: http://news. gallup.com/poll/162815/support-euthanasia-hinges-described.aspx. Sanburn, J. (2016) ‘Why More Americans are Choosing Cremation,’ Time, 188(7), 22 August, p. 21. Scarre, G. (2009) ‘Dying and Philosophy,’ in: Kellehear, A. (ed). The Study of Dying. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 147–162. Shneidman, E. (1973) ‘Megadeath: Children of the Nuclear Family,’ in: Deaths of Man. Baltimore: Penguin Books, pp. 179–198. Strange, J. (2009) ‘Historical Approaches to Dying,’ in: Kellehear, A. (ed). The Study of Dying. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 123–146. Verhey, A. (2011) The Christian Art of Dying. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Ward, B. (2013) ‘The Death Café Discussion Group Steers its Members on How to Live,’ Star Tribune [Minneapolis, MN, online], 24 July. Available at: www.startribune.com/the-death-cafe-discussion-groupsteers-its-members-on-how-to-live/216473041/. Walter, T. (1999) ‘And the Consequence Was . . . .,’ in: Walter, T. (ed). The Mourning for Diana. Oxford: Berg, pp. 271–278.

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3 BRAIN DEATH AND THE POLITICS OF RELIGION Donald Joralemon

1  When dead isn’t New Jersey Assemblyman Richard Kamin (Republican, Morris County) said in December 1990, ‘Death is not a religious or moral belief. Death is a matter of scientific fact’ (Schwaneberg, 1990b). There are two ways to be legally and medically declared dead in the United States. One is by the irreversible cessation of cardiac and pulmonary activity; this is the conventional definition of death that has deep roots in human history. The second is by the determination of catastrophic and permanent loss of neural functioning, at both the cortical and brain stem level (Determination of Death by Neurological Criteria, DDNC). This definition of death emerged along with, and in support of, organ transplantation, permitting the removal of still viable organs from a person whose metabolic functioning can be mechanically sustained right up to the moment of harvesting. It has been considered critical that the ‘whole brain’ definition be applied so as to distinguish the total loss of neural activity from vegetative states, in which the brain stem continues to function. However, despite this distinction and even with over a half-century of application, the second pathway to a death diagnosis remains contentious (Johnson, 2016). Early in the morning of November 26, 2013, 33-year-old Texan Marlise Muñoz went to the kitchen to prepare a bottle for her infant son when she collapsed from what doctors subsequently determined was probably a blood clot in her lungs. She laid on the floor for an hour without breathing before her husband, Erick, found her and, applying his paramedic training, began cardiopulmonary resuscitation. She was transported by ambulance to Fort Worth’s John Peter Smith Hospital (JPSH) where emergency staff sought in vain to save her life. That same day – Thanksgiving Day – she was declared brain dead. Under most circumstances, Marlise’s body would have been transported to the morgue or, if she declared herself an organ donor, to the operating room for the removal of organs to extend the lives of patients on the transplant waiting list. But Marlise was 14 weeks pregnant. Doctors explained to her husband that a section of the Texas Health and Safety Code (Section 166.049) prohibits the withdrawal or withholding of life-sustaining treatment from a pregnant woman and that they would, therefore, not take Marlise off the devices that were keeping her heart pumping and blood flowing.To do otherwise, they argued, would subject the physicians and the hospital to homicide charges, since the Texas Penal Code §1.07 defines murder as intentionally causing the death of an ‘individual,’ a legal term which in Texas explicitly includes ‘an unborn 20

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child at every stage of gestation from fertilization until birth.’ Some of those who rallied against Erick’s insistence that his wife was dead and should be removed from the medical technology, most notably members of pro-life organizations, directly rejected the validity of brain death and insisted that two lives were on the line. State District Judge R. H.Wallace heard Erick’s legal suit and decided that Mrs. Muñoz was dead. Judge Wallace ordered the removal of assist devices no later than January 27 – the hospital did not appeal. On December 9, 2013, medical staff at the University of California San Francisco Benioff Children’s Hospital (BCH) in Oakland, CA, performed a tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy on a 13-year-old girl, Jahi McMath, to resolve her sleep apnea. Profuse bleeding from her nose and mouth during recovery quickly led to a heart attack due to blood loss. A long resuscitation effort re-established a heartbeat with the assistance of a ventilator, but Jahi’s brain had been deprived of oxygen for so long that, on December 12, she was declared brain dead. A week later her mother, Latasha Winkfield, filed suit to stop BCH from disconnecting Jahi from the ventilator. She did not accept that Jahi was dead and told reporters that God may ‘spark her brain awake.’ She said that Jahi would only be dead when her heart stopped. What these two recent cases have in common is religiously inspired rejections of brain death protocols. For Marlise Muñoz, it was the extension of personhood to the moment of fertilization, a core tenet of Catholic and Evangelical doctrine, which interfered with the ordinary management of a brain dead person. For Jahi McMath, it was her mother’s religious faith in a miraculous recovery for her daughter that resulted in legal action to stop the removal of mechanical assist devices. In both instances, there were ample legal precedents and solid physiological data supporting diagnoses of brain death. These are the well-publicized cases in which brain death determinations have run afoul of religious faith, but it is likely that there are many other such disputes. For example, in New York a young adult Jewish male with a diagnosis of a particularly aggressive form of brain cancer (Glioblastoma Multforme) had spiraled downhill as the tumorous growth spread. His parents and younger siblings demanded aggressive care even after physicians explained that a prolonged period of unresponsiveness indicated he was likely brain dead. The family stood sentry at the patient’s room to stop the mandatory confirmatory tests for brain death from being performed and demanded that their son/brother be transported to Israel for ‘alternative therapy.’ Some Orthodox Jews reject the idea of brain death. In this case, the patient was transferred to an acute long-term facility in neighboring New Jersey. To the best of my knowledge, this drama never generated headlines.1 I suspect that there are many similar cases that go unreported.2 What are we to make of these contests over the legitimacy of brain death determinations? I argue that they reflect a growing movement in the United States that pits religious belief against medical knowledge, with increasing legislative might supporting the claim that, as a matter of civil law, religiously grounded beliefs must be rigorously protected. To make my case, I turn to the concept of ‘religious exemptions’ as it has been applied to public policies related to brain death in the states of New York, California, and New Jersey; as well as to the proliferation of so-called Religious Freedom Restoration Acts (RFRA) across the country. I conclude with thoughts about the relationship between these religiously inspired objections to medical practice and the First Amendment of the U. S. Bill of Rights, which both protects religious expression and prohibits government sponsorship of specific religions.

2  Accommodating religious views The United States is not alone in having seen objections raised to the application of brain death definitions. There is well-documented resistance to the concept in countries around the world 21

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such as Mexico (Crowley-Matoka, 2016), Egypt (Hamdy, 2012), Iran (Yousefi, Roshani and Nazari, 2014), Nigeria (Rabiu, Oshol and Adebayo, 2016), Japan (Lock, 2002), England (Kierans and Cooper, 2011), Germany (Hogle, 1996), Norway (Hadders and Alnæs, 2012), and others. In some cases, it is the uncertainty of medical staff and the language used to convey the death determination that contributes to resistance on the part of surviving family. In other instances, it is suspicions among minority populations about the medical profession and its vested interest in securing organs for transplantation. Significant variations in the diagnostic procedures used to determine brain death also lead to reservations about the brain death concept. Perhaps the most frequent source of family resistance is the common-sense disconnect between the meaning of ‘dead’ and the appearance of a person still connected to medical support technologies and manifesting signs of continued life. Each of these sources of resistance can be based on fully secular objections and they are often resolved by better and more sensitive communication procedures, although not necessarily ending with consent for organ donation. It should come as no particular surprise that the determination of death by brain criteria would generate objections based on religious beliefs in the United States.Think of all the points of contention that have emerged in just the past decades over medical practices in America because of conflicts with faith positions: abortion, contraception, embryonic stem cells, cloning, physician-assisted death, withdrawal of hydration and nutrition for persons in vegetative states, vaccinations, artificial reproduction – the list goes on. However, this particular religious objection is unusual in that it opposes a medical category that is firmly established in both federal and state law – not to mention international conventions – and is intricately tied to a medical procedure (organ transplantation) that enjoys widespread approval. Even so, three states (New York, California, and New Jersey) have judged objections to brain death diagnoses on religious or moral grounds worthy of accommodation. For nine years, beginning in the late 1970s, the New York State Medical Society urged the Legislature to adopt a law acknowledging the legal status of brain death diagnoses. At the time the only protection physicians had from accusations of homicide when they terminated treatment for a brain dead person was an Appeals Court decision (People of New York v. John Eulo v. Robert Bonilla, 1984) blocking the claim of two convicted murderers that the removal of life support, not the injuries they caused, was responsible for their victims’ deaths. That decision concluded, The term “death” . . . may be construed to embrace a determination, made according to accepted medical standards, that a person has suffered an irreversible cessation of breathing and heartbeat or, when these functions are artificially maintained, an irreversible cessation of the functioning of the entire brain, including the brain stem.’ Notwithstanding this judicial protection, New York physicians demonstrated a reluctance to act on brain diagnoses, resulting in unnecessary and expensive medical care performed on what were, from a medical perspective, cadavers, as well as long delays for families anxious to put an end to their own uncertainty.The Medical Society insisted that this terrible situation could only be remedied by legislative action; instead, Governor Mario Cuomo appointed a thirty-onemember ‘State Task Force on Life and the Law’ to develop guidelines for the determination of death. The resulting Guidelines for Determining Brain Death (2011) required all New York State Hospitals to develop written policies that identify the procedures and tests for a brain death diagnosis, that provide standards for notifying next of kin that such tests and procedures are in progress, and that offer ‘reasonable accommodation of an individual’s or Surrogate Decision-maker’s religious or moral objection to the use of the brain death standard to determine death’ (p. 3). 22

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The Guidelines offer little direction as to what ‘accommodations’ should include, beyond a vague reference to ‘the continuation of artificial respiration under certain circumstances.’ They do require that the duration of the accommodations be specified, and that persons and groups to whom objections might be addressed – ‘clergy members, ethics committees, palliative care clinicians, bereavement counselors and conflict mediators’ – should be identified. Perhaps most interestingly, the Guidelines stipulate that objections that are based solely upon ‘psychological denial that death has occurred or on an alleged inadequacy of the brain death determination’ and not on moral or religious beliefs, are not due reasonable accommodation (p. 4). The document is silent on the question of how physicians are to distinguish denial from religious or moral beliefs. California’s ‘Accommodations and Brain Death Act’ (Cal. HSC. Code §1254.4, enacted in 2009) adopts a position similar to New York’s Guidelines. It requires ‘reasonable efforts’ to accommodate objections to a brain death determination voiced by family or surrogate decisionmakers on the basis of ‘religious or cultural practices.’ Like New York, the legislation leaves it up to the hospital to define what is reasonable, but it demands consideration of the ‘needs of other patients and prospective patients in urgent need of care’ (Cal. HSC. Code §1254.4). The state of New Jersey took a different path to brain death. After extended and contentious debate in the legislature, the ‘New Jersey Declaration of Death Act’ (P.L. 1991, Chapter 90, Codified as Chapter 6A of Title 26 of the Revised Statutes) was passed by the senate and assembly, and signed into law by Governor Jim Florio on April 8, 1991. An amendment that was taken out and then re-inserted states: The death of an individual shall not be declared upon the basis of neurological criteria pursuant to sections 3 and 4 of this act when the licensed physician authorized to declare death, has reason to believe, on the basis of information in the individual’s available medical records, or information provided by a member of the individual’s family or any other person knowledgeable about the individual’s personal religious beliefs that such a declaration would violate the personal religious beliefs of the individual. In these cases, death shall be declared, and the time of death fixed, solely upon the basis of cardio-respiratory criteria pursuant to section 2 of this act. 26:6A-5 This is the only statutory exemption to brain death for religious objections in the United States and it goes further than New York’s Guidelines by specifying the remedy: requiring that only a cardio-respiratory determination be applied in such cases. Unlike New York’s policy, the New Jersey law only accepts ‘personal religious beliefs’ – not moral objections – and makes no mention of psychological denial. The text was not without opposition from legal, medical, and organ transplant groups. For example, Tony Pizzutillo, a lobbyist for a coalition of legal and medical groups (e.g. the New Jersey Hospital Association, the State Bar Association, the New Jersey Organ and Tissue Sharing Network, the New Jersey Medical Society, and the State Nurses Association) said that his clients are ‘highly uncomfortable with allowing medical science to be meddled with by religious beliefs’ (Schwaneberg, 1990b). Dr. Abbott Krieger, chief of neurological surgery at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, insisted that ‘this is a medical decision. Once a person is brain-dead, they’re dead’ (ibid.). On the other side, Rabbi Shmuel Blech, a member of the state Bioethics Commission that drafted the law, argued that, ‘[w]e ought not to deny those who have religious reason for interpreting death as their forebears did their rights under the law’ (Schwaneberg, 1990a). Others testified that the exemption would be ‘an expression of the state’s commitment to religious liberty’ (ibid.). State Senator Gabriel Ambrosio (Democrat, Bergen) made the odd claim, given 23

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the medical reality of brain death, that a ‘patient does not lose his or her rights just because of a debilitating illness’ (Schwaneberg, 1991). New Jersey’s solitary status as a legal refuge for brain death objectors has resulted in it being the destination for families battling to avoid, or void, death determinations in other states. The young Jewish man transferred to a New Jersey care facility is not alone. Jahi McMath was also moved to the Garden State when a California court opened the door to her family to take charge of her care. Although I have not found any record of the number of such transfers, I strongly suspect that these are not the only cases. At the same time, it would be a mistake to treat New Jersey as a singular supporter of religious exemptions. We need to put these three states’ protections in the wider context of national efforts to grant religious beliefs special consideration under a variety of healthcare mandates. The proliferation of so-called Religious Freedom Restoration Acts suggests a broader movement in the contest between medicine and politics in the United States.

3  The scope of the religious exemption It is beyond the focus of this writing to rehearse the U. S. legal history of religious protections, beginning with the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights and its guarantee of free exercise of religion and proceeding to the highly contentious Hobby Lobby decision (Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 2014), which granted for-profit corporations operated by Christians an exemption from the ‘Contraception Mandate’ in the Affordable Care Act. Suffice it to say that over the last twenty-five years there has been what Professor John Witte Jr., director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University, calls ‘a sort of religious affirmative action program’ that has carved out ‘more than 200 special arrangements, protections or exemptions for religious groups or their adherents’ (Henriques, 2006). These range from regulatory exceptions for day-care centers associated with religious institutions to special treatment in zoning and taxation decisions for the construction of faith-related facilities. When weighing the responsibility of state and federal authorities to avoid or mitigate burdens on religious freedom resulting from laws or policies two different standards have been applied. The first demands that any law or policy that imposes a burden on religious liberty has to be justified by proving a compelling governmental interest and by demonstrating that the least restrictive means possible has been adopted – this is the so-called strict scrutiny model.The second approach, applied in the important Supreme Court decision in Employment Division v. Smith (1990),3 permits the burden of religious liberty in the application of laws if those laws do not single out religious institutions or practitioners (neutrality) and are generally applied. Under this standard, claimants would have to prove that a law disproportionately harms them and their free exercise of religious belief. The reasonableness of the law itself would not be at issue, only whether it is equitably applied. In the wake of the Smith decision, Congress debated and passed the ‘Religious Freedom Restoration Act’ (RFRA) that President Clinton signed into law (Pub. L. No. 103–141, 107 Stat. 1488, November 16, 1993) requiring that the courts return to the ‘strict scrutiny’ standard. The relevant passage of the Act reads: Government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability, except . . . if it demonstrates that the application of the burden to the person: 1) is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest; and 2) is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest. 24

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Soon after passage of the Act, the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional as applied to state laws. A claim could be made against a federal law considered burdensome, but the federal government would exceed its constitutional mandate were it to step in to arbitrate disputes over state laws. This decision, in turn, stimulated a proliferation of state RFRAs, designed to make sure that the strict scrutiny required by the federal law would apply as well in local jurisdictions. As of 2015, twenty states had adopted their own versions of the federal RFRA and an additional six states had such laws pending approval (Johnson and Steinmetz, 2015). It should be added that the laws show significant variation (Lund, 2010). I can’t draw a direct line between RFRAs, at either the state or federal level, and the attempts by New York and New Jersey to offer accommodation to religious objections to brain death determinations since neither state has adopted such legislation.4 However, I consider it likely that the general climate favoring an expanding list of religious exemptions, of which RFRAs are symptomatic, is implicated in the approach taken by the two states, as well as by the lenient response of the California court in the McMath case. It has simply become conventional in the United States for politicians and some judges – as well as the legal advisors for hospitals – to assume it is best to err on the side of tolerance when belief challenges medical science.

4  Is accommodation required? Those who object to brain death determinations on religious grounds typically base their claim on an expansive and unqualified notion of the sanctity of human life, derived from the religious belief that only God gives life and only God can take it.They insist that only the cessation of the heart beat is consistent with a God-ordained death, both because this is the traditional definition of death and because a person who has suffered the loss of all neural capacity is still ‘alive’ according to their essentialist definition of life (and thanks to the supportive technology that maintains coronary and respiratory functions). The ‘burden’ these persons suffer is, in their view, that their loved one is being prematurely declared dead against God’s will.The most radical position is that acting on a brain death declaration is equivalent to killing the person. Does this burden rise to the ‘substantial’ level required under the U.S. judicial standard of strict scrutiny? Is there a compelling governmental interest in the application of brain death criteria and is there a less impactful alternative by which that interest could be met? We do not get very far by simply asserting, as in the quote with which I began this chapter, the ontological superiority of ‘medical facts.’When it comes to determining death, choosing any single indicator of the end of life is really rather arbitrary. Sherwin Nuland (1995), along with many other physicians and ethicists, reminded us that death is a process, not a moment, and that any number of physical measures might just as well be used to pinpoint the difference between alive and dead (Truog and Miller, 2014). It is only a culturally specific theory of personhood that leads us to apply either brain or heart criteria in defining death.5 The burden on religious beliefs imposed by brain death determinations should be assessed in comparison to the cardiac alternative that believers claim to prefer. Unfortunately for their argument, there is a strong equivalence between the two so long as we remove from the discussion the association between brain death declarations and requests for organ donation (these are separable because accepting one does not require accepting the other). In hospital settings, for both brain death and terminal cardiac failure, the person’s biological functions are perpetuated only as a result of assist technologies (e.g. blood pressure boosting medications, mechanical ventilators, and endo-tracheal breathing tubes) and the removal of those technologies will cause the progressive collapse of all metabolic systems, i.e. death. Thus, if there is a ‘burden’ it is the removal of assist technologies, not the declaration of brain death. This recognition would shift 25

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the question from the legitimacy of brain death criteria to a more familiar discussion of medical futility. It wouldn’t eliminate conflict, but it would remove any religious-based differentiation between brain and cardiac definitions of death and diminish the claim that the application of the former constitutes a ‘substantial’ burden. The case in favor of a compelling state interest in accepting brain death rests on the importance of consistency in the legal and medical management of death. It should be obvious that a variation in death determinations that would mean a person is ‘dead’ in one state but ‘alive’ in another would result in profound legal and moral complications. In the McMath case, for example, the family’s medical malpractice suit will be profoundly affected by a court’s decision about whether she died in California in the immediate aftermath of her surgery. Likewise, inheritance laws could be thrown into chaos if a person were declared dead in one state but then considered alive in another. In addition to these legal matters, there is also an emotional price to be paid for family members who are, like their loved one, left in a liminal state for a potentially long period of time. I conclude that there is a compelling public interest in a fair and even-handed determination of death by medical professionals to follow national standards. I also think we must consider the precedent that would be set if medical decisions based on scientific evidence could be overridden by assertions of burdens on religious beliefs. The dangers are real. In California, religious objections to childhood vaccinations put the public health at risk by rising numbers of parents claiming the exemption when they actually had just accepted the scientifically refuted claim of a link between vaccinations and autism.The application of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Hobby Lobby case will likely result in the denial of critical reproductive services for employees who may not share their employers’ Christian faith. Pharmacies will be granted conscience exemptions from providing important drugs based on even the slimmest of burden claims. There are simply no limits to the claims that could be brought to the courts under either state or federal RFRAs. The second of the RFRA requirements, that applying brain death criteria must be less harmful to religious freedom than any alternative, requires that we ask, ‘less harmful for whom?’ It may be that the McMath family’s religious beliefs or, in the Muñoz case, the unrelated objectors’ convictions would be harmed less by waiting for cardiac failure for the pronouncement of death, but that alternative is itself harmful to other stakeholders, including the care givers who would have to preserve the metabolism of a person whom medicine considers dead (Miller, 2016). There is also the question of the financial burden of continued interventions, which would be at issue unless the objectors pay all medical bills.6

5 Conclusion Many countries have experienced objections to the application of brain death criteria on religious grounds. For example, a recent article in the British Journal of Anaesthesia (Randhawa, 2012) notes that in the UK brain death has ‘in some faith groups, led to considerable debate and remains contested by faith leaders’ (p. 89). By contrast, another UK-based study (Cooper and Kierans, 2016) sees religion as a potential mediating or ‘brokering’ tool to encourage acceptance of a brain death determination and the donation of organs. In other countries – Egypt, for example (Hamdy, 2012) – the conflict between some religious commentaries and brain death has led physicians to avoid the problem altogether by relying only on cardiac death (Hamdy, 2012), with a resulting limitation on the types and numbers of organ transplants that are performed (e.g. kidney transplants with living donors). What sets the United States apart from other countries is the evolving application of constitutional arguments based on religious freedom for the rejection of brain death. As noted above, 26

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this is just a part of a wider set of initiatives that pit religion against medicine. The underlying problem with these efforts is that they are based on a partial understanding of the United States Constitution’s guarantee of religious liberty. The First Amendment to the Constitution’s Bill of Rights combines a prohibition against laws that inhibit the free exercise of religion with an equally strong rejection of governmental sponsorship or promotion of any particular religion – the ‘establishment clause.’ The application of RFRA statutes, especially in the context of medicine, threatens to violate this second component of the First Amendment. The Texas statute that caused Eric Muñoz so much needless suffering is clearly an example of the state imposing a particular religious view on a public that may not share that belief. The sidestepping of legitimate brain death determinations, with significant public consequences, can also be seen as a violation of the establishment clause to the degree that it favors one religious view over others, with no consideration for the impact on non-believers. America threatens to lose the critical balance between protecting religious liberty and avoiding state-sponsorship of specific faiths. Physicians are often on the frontlines of conflicting religious views; the institutions that employ them are the final guardians of a reasonable balance between the equitable application of medical knowledge and resources on the one hand, and a concern for justice on the other. Going forward, demands for exemptions to the application of brain death determinations should be met with a mixture of kindness, understanding, and a solid commitment to the equal application of medicine. The United States’ courts and legislative bodies should also pull back from an overly zealous approach to the protection of religious beliefs and recognize that addressing one ‘burden’ can cause more burdens for others. Key words: brain death, Bill of Rights, permanent/persistent vegetative state, organ trans­ plantation

Notes 1 This case was described to me by one of the physicians responsible for the patient’s care. 2 Interviews with members of hospital ethics committees in New England and in the Southwest indicate that such disputes do arise with some regularity, but that they are typically resolved by allowing the family time to adjust to the news. In one case, a Native American healer was called to the bedside to certify that the person had died. 3 Smith, a member of the Native American Church, had sued Oregon’s Employment Division for unemployment benefits after being fired as a drug counselor on the grounds that he had used peyote, a scheduled drug. Smith’s use was in the context of rituals in the church. 4 Both states have legislatures currently working on RFRA legislation at the time of this writing. 5 Brain death determinations are, however, further complicated by their connections to the pragmatics of organ transplantation. 6 Johnson (2016), in an argument favoring accommodation, argues that prohibiting insurance companies from denying continuing coverage when a family objects to a brain death determination would eliminate the financial burden that the hospital would otherwise shoulder.There would, however, be a cost to all insurance premium payers for the additional expenses and a commitment of medical resources that other patients may need. Johnson understates the degree and cost of care required to maintain biological functions in a brain dead patient.

Further reading Crowley, M. (ed). (2017) From Birth to Death and Bench to Clinic: The Hastings Center Bioethics Briefing Book for Journalists, Policymakers, and Campaigns. Garrison, NY:  The Hastings Center. A very useful review of current bioethical debates, including those related to the end of life, with concise bibliographies.

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Donald Joralemon Institute of Medicine (2015) Dying in America: Improving Quality and Honoring Individual Preferences Near the End of Life. Washington, DC:  The National Academies Press. A federally funded study of challenges facing Americans at the end of life. Joralemon, D. (2016) Mortal Dilemmas: The Troubled Landscape of Death in America. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. This volume contains helpful chapters on physician-assisted death, persistent vegetative states, and the cultural context of death determinations. Tebbe, N. (2017) Religious Freedom in an Egalitarian Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. This volume provides context for current disputes over religious freedom and offers strategies for mediation. Veatch, R. M. and Ross, L. F. (2016) Defining Death: The Case for Choice. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. This volume provides historical context for the brain death debates and argues for choice as a way to protect basic religious and philosophical beliefs about human existence.

Bibliography Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. (2014) 573 U.S. No.13–354 and No.13–356. Cooper, J. and Kierans, C. (2016) ‘Organ Donation, Ethnicity and the Negotiation of Death: Ethnographic Insights From the UK,’ Mortality, 21(1), pp. 1–18. Crowley-Matoka, M. (2016) Domesticating Organ Transplant: Familial Sacrifice and National Aspiration in Mexico. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith (1990) 494 U.S. 872. Hadders, H. and Hambro Alnæs, A. (2012) ‘Enacting Death: Contested Practices in the Organ Donation Clinic,’ Nursing Inquiry, 20(3), pp. 245–255. Hamdy, S. (2012) Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press. Henriques, D. B. (2006) ‘Religion Trumps Regulation as Legal Exemptions Grow,’ New York Times, October 8, pp. 1 and 17. Hogle, L. F. (1996) ‘Transforming “Body Parts” into Therapeutic Tools: A Report From Germany,’ Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 10(4), pp. 675–682. Johnson, D. and Steinmetz, K. (2015) ‘This Map Shows Every State with Religious-Freedom Laws,’ Time [online], 2 April.Available at: http://time.com/3766173/religious-freedom-laws-map-timeline/. [Accessed 8 August 2016]. Johnson, L. S. (2016) ‘The Case for Reasonable Accommodations of Conscientious Objections to Declarations of Brain Death,’ Bioethical Inquiry, 13(1), pp. 105–115. Kierans, C. and Cooper, J. (2011) ‘Organ Donation, Genetics, Race and Culture,’ Anthropology Today, 27(6), pp. 11–14. Lock, M. (2002) Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lund, C. C. (2010) ‘Religious Liberty After Gonzales: A Look at State REFRAS,’ South Dakota Law Review, 55(3), pp. 466–497. Miller, G. (2016) ‘Re-examining the Origin and Application of Determination of Death by Neurological Criteria (DDNC),’ Bioethical Inquiry, 13(1), pp. 27–29. New York State Department of Health and New York State Task Force on Life and the Law (2011) Guidelines for Determining Brain Death. Revised and Updated Edition. New York. Nuland, S. (1995) How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter. New York:  Vintage. People of New York v. John Eulo v. Robert Bonilla (1984) 63 NY2d 341. Rabiu, T., Oshola, H. and Adebayo, B. (2016) ‘Survey of Knowledge of Brainstem Death and Attitude Toward Organ Donation Among Relations of Neurosurgical Patients in Nigeria,’ Transplantation Proceedings, 48(6), pp. 1898–1903. Randhawa, G. (2012) ‘Death and Organ Donation: Meeting the Needs of Multiethnic and Multifaith Populations,’ British Journal of Anaesthesia, 108(Sup. 1), pp. 88–91.

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Brain death and the politics of religion Schwaneberg, R. (1990a) ‘Medical and Legal Groups Oppose Religious Exemption on Brain Death,’ Star Ledger (Newark, NJ), 16 November, p. 4. Schwaneberg, R. (1990b) ‘Assembly Fight Brewing Over Religious Exemptions in Brain Death Rule,’ StarLedger (Newark, NJ), 16 December, p. 3. Schwaneberg, R. (1991) ‘Landmark Law Lets Patient’s Beliefs Define Death,’ Star Ledger (Newark, NJ), 9 April, p. 19. Truog, R. D. and Miller, F. G. (2014) ‘Changing the Conversation About Brain Death,’ American Journal of Bioethics, 14(8), pp. 9–14. Yousefi, H., Roshani, A. and Nazari, F. (2014) ‘Experiences of the Families Concerning Organ Donation of a Family Member with Brain Death,’ Iran Journal of Nursing and Midwifery Research, 19(3), pp. 323–330.

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4 UNDERSTANDING GRIEF Theoretical perspectives1 Kenneth J. Doka

1 Introduction Ernest Becker, in The Denial of Death (1973), reminds us that from the beginning of time, humans have been distressed by a paradox.They can understand their bodies are mortal and will die and decay while simultaneously retaining a belief that their minds affirm a sense of immortality. The reality of death, as well as the death of those loved, then remains deeply troubling. It is little wonder then that the earliest extant writings focused on death, loss, and grief. The Gilgamesh Epic, for example – one of the first epic poems – recounts the hero’s attempt to achieve immortality, while the Egyptian Book of the Dead offers counsel to deceased souls as they navigate the afterlife. All religious scriptures address issues of death and grief. It is evident in the earliest plays and literature from the Greeks through Shakespeare. The earliest writings of psychology and the social sciences explored mourning – trying to chart the process of grief. In this chapter, we explore those early theoretical efforts to conceptualize grief – looking at the earliest work.We consider the efforts to identify universal stages of grief and chart the movement to the recognition of the very individual pathways that persons pursue as they cope with loss. Finally we identify some of the contemporary currents and promising theoretical efforts to understand one of humankind’s oldest problems.

2  Early approaches Freud’s 1917 paper, ‘Mourning and Melancholia,’ while not actually the first paper offered on grief, is oft considered the beginning of the current psychological and scientific study of grief. Freud, in the paper, dealt with a still contemporary and contentious issue2 – the relationship between grief and depression. While Freud’s piece never really resolved that debate, he made a number of points that framed – for many decades – our understanding of grief. Grief or mourning, in Freud’s terminology, derived from the tension between an individual’s desire to maintain a relationship with the deceased individual and the demands of reality that such a relationship was no longer possible. To Freud, then, the goal of mourning was to gradually divest the emotional energy invested in the deceased and reinvest it in other relationships. Freud’s notion that the goal of mourning is emotional detachment – the severing of any psychic bonds to the deceased – would later be contested (see Klass, Silverman and Nickman, 1996). 30

Understanding grief

Nonetheless, Freud’s piece contributed deeply to our understanding of grief. Freud, for example, recognized that grief could result not just from death but also from any significant experience of loss. Interestingly, Freud’s case illustration in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ was a bride abandoned at the altar. Freud identified that a highly ambivalent relationship could complicate the mourning process. Finally, Freud also recognized that mourning was a necessary, healthy, and normal response to a loss. While that normalcy was the case, Freud acknowledged that sometimes a loss could precipitate or trigger ‘melancholia’ or what we now call ‘depression.’ John Bowlby’s work (1980) also contributed both directly and indirectly to the study of grief. Bowlby was interested in studying attachment. He was fascinated by the fact that humans – and for that matter all primates – formed significant attachments that lasted over years with their young. These attachments could even create conditions where primates would put their own lives at risk to protect their young. To Bowlby there was a biologically based tendency to attach for security and safety. The infant is, after all, entirely dependent on his or her mother. Bowlby’s study of attachment inevitably led him to study what occurs when an attachment is severed. For Bowlby, situations that endanger a bond will arouse great emotional reactions designed to retain the bond.The infant will, for example, scream and wail, waiting for the mother to recognize the distress and resume the attachment. In situations of loss, the crying gradually extinguishes as the infant begins to face the reality that the attachment will never be resumed. Bowlby also noted that different attachment styles may influence the grieving process. For example, children who have a secure base – that is a strong maternal connection – will likely have a relatively uncomplicated response to a loss while those with more avoidant or ambivalent attachments are likely to have more complicated reactions to grief. The notion of attachment styles has been a very fruitful avenue in understanding grief – one that figures prominently in much work including that of Colin Murray Parkes (see, for example, 2006), a student of Bowlby who remains highly influential in contemporary grief studies. Perhaps the one criticism of Bowlby is his emphasis on maternal attachment as we now know that other attachment figures such as fathers or grandparents can offer a child secure attachments even if the maternal figure is absent or unavailable. While Freud’s paper and Bowlby’s work were certainly some of the more significant contributions to the theory of grief, Erich Lindemann (1944) offered one of the first empirical studies of grief. Lindemann studied the survivors of those killed in war or the Coconut Grove fire – a tragedy where a number of young adults were killed when a fire swept through a popular Boston night club.While Lindemann also included family members who died in a hospital, his sample was skewed toward younger victims who died under traumatic circumstances. Lindemann described acute grief as a syndrome with clear symptomatology that included physical, cognitive, behavioral, affective, and spiritual manifestations. He also recognized that acute grief could result in complications in that grief reactions may be delayed, exaggerated, or absent. However, like any complications to an illness, these distorted reactions can be transformed into normal grief.

3  The stages of grief In 1969, a Swiss-born psychiatrist working at the University of Chicago, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, published what was to become an international best-seller, On Death and Dying. In that book Kübler-Ross proposed that dying patients experienced a predictable set of reactions as they coped with dying. Their first response was one of denial – ignoring or minimizing the implications of their diagnosis. When denial was no longer tenable, these patients moved into a stage of anger. Knowing that they could no longer deny the reality of death, patients responded with rage at the unfairness of their illness. This gave way eventually to a stage of bargaining, that in 31

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some ways presaged eventual acceptance. Here the patient begins to accept the reality of death but seeks some control over the timing or circumstances (for example, ‘I want to live till my daughter’s wedding’). As the patient slides toward death, and begins to recognize both death’s inevitability and the patient’s own loss of control of the process, the patient moves to a state of depression before finally acknowledging the acceptance of death. While Kübler-Ross’ work focused on how individuals cope with the dying process, it soon became applied to the study of how persons respond to a variety of losses. In fact, she noted in On Death and Dying that family members of dying individuals – as well as medical staff – may have reactions that parallel the dying individual’s reactions, thus implying that these reactions could readily be applied to the study of grief. This application was later further developed with the publication of On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief through the Five Stages of Loss (Kübler-Ross and Kessler, 2005). Here the application was explicit. Kübler-Ross’ work soon became a dominant paradigm in the field. There are many reasons for this dominance. First, Kübler-Ross, as a psychiatrist, dressed her model in medical technology where the idea of staging is central to the study of disease. Second, Kübler-Ross’ model allowed a sense of medical management – offering a paradigm that could manage the patient’s progress from denial to acceptance. Yet, it cannot be denied that Kübler-Ross was the right messenger who appeared at the right time. She was a charismatic speaker who could enthrall audiences. Her book was written for the general public and included compelling stories of individuals coping with dying.The time was right as well. On Death and Dying came at a time of renewed interest in care of the dying as hospice was just beginning to develop. In fact, the popularity of her book, in many ways, facilitated the development of hospice as the enduring message of On Death and Dying was that both caring for and communication with dying individuals were essential attributes of a good death (Corr, 1993). Finally, her book resonated with more general social trends. In the late 1960s there was a move away from dehumanizing technology and the medicalization of care. At a time when there was a move toward natural birth, Kübler-Ross spoke of natural death (Klass and Hutch, 1986). Despite the widespread acceptance and popularity of Kübler-Ross’ stage theory, there were also very many criticisms. Some of these were methodological. Kübler-Ross’ book is impressionistic.There are no methodological statements such as the populations studied or any exposition of results. Kübler-Ross is unclear as to whether these stages are descriptive or prescriptive. That is, one is never sure whether Kübler-Ross is simply describing a process or suggesting that the goal of therapy is to move individuals toward acceptance. Finally there is little empirical evidence that supports the notion of stages in grief (Kastenbaum, 2009). Finally, the stage model does not recognize individual differences – implying that grief is a universal process untouched by individual, circumstantial, developmental, relational, spiritual, cultural, or any other variables that might influence an individual’s distinct response to a loss.

4  Beyond stages Within two decades after the publication of On Death and Dying, there were a few significant attempts to move beyond a stage theory of grief. Catherine Sanders’ empirical research led her to propose a phase theory of the process of grief (Sanders, 1989). To Sanders, most people followed a common sequence in the process of grieving. The first phase was shock as individuals began to feel the impact of the death. In each phase, Sanders related the psychological, cognitive, and physical sequelae of grief. For example, in the shock phase, physical symptoms can include such things as weeping, tremors, or loss of appetite. Psychologically, bereaved persons may

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experience psychological distancing, egocentric phenomena, or preoccupation with thoughts of the deceased. Cognitive manifestations at this phase can include disbelief, restlessness, and a heightened state of alarm or a sense of unreality or helplessness. This plurality of symptoms illustrates that in each of the phases, Sanders recognized, on the basis of her research, both the individuality and multiplicity of grief reactions – a significant advancement over the common stage theory (Kübler-Ross, 1969). The second phase Sanders proposed was the awareness of loss. Here the funeral rituals are over. Support has ebbed as family and friends resume their own lives. Until now, shock and support have acted as a buffer. Now as the shock recedes and friends withdraw, the primary grievers experience the full force of their loss. This phase is often an intense period of high emotional and cognitive arousal as separation anxiety is intense and stress is prolonged. Grief is both raw and deeply painful. Crying, anger, frustration, guilt, yearning, anxieties, and shame are common. Bereaved individuals often experience sleep disturbances in this phase, further exacerbating fatigue. Psychologically bereaved individuals may still experience denial and disbelief.They may be highly sensitive to the comments or responses of others. Sanders noted that in this phase, dreaming of the deceased as well as other experiences where the deceased’s presence is experienced is common. The very intensity of this phase is limiting. The bereaved person becomes exhausted and needs to withdraw from others in order to conserve limited energy. Sanders then proposed conservation-withdrawal as the third phase of bereavement.This is a long, sometimes never ending phase of grief. The grieving individual now seems to be functioning. Pain is more chronic than acute. Often the person feels physically weak and helpless – going through the motions rather than actively living life. Often bereaved individuals express a belief that they are now in state of ‘hibernation’ – a sort of holding pattern as they struggle with adapting to the loss. Sanders suggested that bereaved persons face three choices when they are in this phase. This acknowledgment of choice is an important contribution. As Sanders noted prior to this point the main factors motivating movement are primarily unconscious or biological. In the face of physical and psychological stress, with an immune system overburdened by chronic stress, some may consciously or unconsciously seek their own death rather than live without the person who died. Still others may assume that the energy for major life adjustments requires more strength and power than they presently possess.They may choose to retain the status quo – living their remaining lives in a diminished state of chronic grief. Others may make a conscious decision to move forward – to move on and adjust to their loss. Such individuals often experience a fourth phase: healing – the turning point. In Sanders’s research, many bereaved individuals could actually point to a moment where they consciously decided that their lives needed to change. In one of Sanders’ illustrative case vignettes, an older widow recalls hearing her young granddaughter ask her mother, the widow’s adult daughter, why grandma always cries. The widow resolved that she had to do something lest she be remembered as the ‘grandma who always cried.’ In this phase individuals reconstruct their identities and lives with an enhanced sense of restored physical health, increased energy, and psychological vigor. Finally these individuals move to a fifth phase of bereavement that Sanders called renewal. While the individual still has occasional bad days and episodic moments of grief such as at the anniversary of the death and other significant events, bereaved persons now experience a new level of functioning characterized by enhanced self-awareness, increased levels of energy, personal revitalization, and the renewal of social ties. At this phase, bereaved individuals have learned to live without the physical presence of the person even as they retain an internal sense of the deceased’s presence. Sanders noted that in this phase, bereaved individuals could often process

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and even enjoy memories of the deceased without the high emotional arousal often experienced earlier in the grieving process. As she approached later life, Sanders suggested an additional phase – fulfillment. Here the loss is fully integrated within the grieving individual’s life. The individual achieves a sense of growth through the loss.While the loss is never welcomed, it is now difficult to imagine life without the loss. In some ways finding meaning from the loss has added significant meaning and purpose to the individual’s life (Doka, 2006). Sanders’ phase theory offered significant advances over the earlier and at the time the prevalent stage theory of Kübler-Ross (1969). First, Sanders offered a research-based sequence of the process of grief rather than a set of clinical observations of the types of reactions that bereaved inexorably experience. Second, Sanders’ work emphasized that bereaved individuals had many different types of reactions including physical, psychological, social, and cognitive – emphasizing both the individuality of the grief process and expanding the range of reactions associated with grief. Her work on mitigating factors (1989) demonstrated how both the characteristics of the bereaved individual and the context of the death and the social support available influenced the process of grief. Third, Sanders’ work was integrative – drawing from an extensive review of research and theoretical perspectives that included Bowlby (1980), Parkes (1972), and Raphael (1984). Most importantly, though, Sanders was one of the first theorists to affirm that individuals had choices within grief. Her writing emphasized that bereaved individuals were active participants in the mourning process rather than simply persons passively coping with a process where they experienced little control. Sanders’ stages of renewal and fulfillment even presaged such current trends in contemporary bereavement theory such as grief as a transformative experience (Prend, 1997; Schneider, 1994) where a loss can lead to significant personal growth as bereaved persons struggle to readapt to life without the deceased. Moreover, her work emphasized that grieving persons maintain a conscious attachment to the deceased that foreshadowed work on continuing bonds (Klass, Silverman and Nickman, 1996). Perhaps the most important move away from the stage theory of grief was the task model pioneered by J.William Worden (1981).Worden’s task model offered an advance not only to the stage theories of grief but also Sanders’ phase theory. Rather than a lineal model, Worden proposed that coping with grief involved a series of tasks – or issues – that needed to be resolved. In his first edition, Worden delineated four such tasks. These tasks, as delineated in the first edition (Worden, 1981) included: 1) to accept the reality of the death, 2) to work through the pain of grief, 3) to adjust to an environment where the deceased is missing, and 4) to withdraw emotional energy from the deceased and invest it in new relationships.There were other strengths to a task model. It acknowledged the individuality of the grief process.While individuals may have to address common issues as they encounter loss, they do so in their own way. Any individual may have his or her own reactions and adaptations as they undertake the tasks. As with any set of tasks, some may be easier to tackle while others are more problematic. Some persons may struggle as they process the emotions inherent in loss while others may have difficulty coping with life without the deceased. Finally, the task model affirms individual autonomy. Individuals will choose the task work they are competent and comfortable to do on their own timetable (Corr, 1992). Moreover, the model has significant therapeutic value, by offering counselors a paradigm to assess the issues that an individual is struggling with in grief, allowing focused interventions to address a given task. In a similar way, it offers models for psycho-education and group support in grief – reminding counselors that it is insufficient only to focus on emotional work as that is only one of the issues inherent in loss.

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5  New understandings of grief Worden’s model essentially represented a paradigm shift in our understanding of the grieving process. As research continued on grief, a number of new understandings of grief emerged. We will examine four of these new understandings at present.

5.1  Extending the definition of ‘grief ’ Grief now is understood as a reaction to loss, no longer limited to a reaction to death. This understanding, in fact, was integral to the field from its onset. It is interesting that Freud’s (1917) illustration in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ is a bride left standing at the altar. Despite that illustration, most work has emphasized grief as a reaction to death. But recent works have broadened that understanding. My work, on disenfranchised grief (Doka, 1989; 2002), addressed the wide range of losses that engender grief, stressing that the very lack of recognition of the grief experienced in such losses complicates grief. Rando (1993) in her classic, The Treatment of Complicated Mourning, spends considerable time discussing tangible and intangible losses that create grief reactions. This shift is a critical one since it allows the application of the study of grief to areas such as divorce or job loss, and it allows the study of grief to draw from the considerable literature around stress, coping, and adaptation (i.e. seeing grief as a type of stress reaction and mourning as a form of coping or adaptation). Nonetheless, there exists the danger of trivializing grief, that is, if every loss evokes grief, the term becomes less important, signifying little. The anecdote is to support research that clarifies the grief reactions and outcomes in a wide array of losses, allowing comparisons between grief reactions and outcome from a death and those from other losses.

5.2  Beyond affect While research from Lindemann (1944) has always emphasized that grief is manifested in many ways including cognitive, physical, emotional, behavioral, and spiritual reactions, much attention has been placed on affect to the exclusion of other responses. This reflects a general Western preoccupation with affect in counseling and therapy (see Sue and Sue, 1999). While a number of publications have stressed reactions other than affect to loss, two may serve as examples. First, Neimeyer (2001) has emphasized that the reconstruction of meaning represents a critical issue, if not the critical issue in grief, adding both a strong cognitive and spiritual component to the study of grief. Second, Doka and Martin (2010) have suggested a continuum of styles ranging from the intuitive to the instrumental. Intuitive grievers experience, express, and adapt to grief in strongly affective ways. Instrumental grievers alternatively are likely to experience muted affective reactions to loss. Their experience is more likely to be cognitive and behavioral, and such strategies will be favored for expression and adaptation to loss. Their work strongly challenges the notion that expressing feelings is the most effective way to adapt to loss. It should be noted that Martin and Doka’s (2000) work began as a way to understand the grieving patterns of males. They now see these styles as related to, but not determined by gender.

5.3  Beyond coping: understanding post-traumatic growth Early work in the field tended to emphasize the difficulty of coping with loss, focusing on restoring a sense of equilibrium in the face of loss while slowly and painfully withdrawing

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emotional energy from the deceased. The perception of the survivor was primarily passive, struggling to adjust to changes out of their control. This concept was strongly challenged in the work of Catherine Sanders (1989). In her phase model of grief, Sanders emphasized that bereaved persons have choices in grief, including the choice to significantly grow in the course of this loss experience. This concept that growth can be a possible outcome of grief is apparent in other current work including Neimeyer (2001) and Prend (1997). However this focus on growth has been most developed in the work of Calhoun and Tedeschi (2006). Here the authors delineate a number of different ways that individuals who experience a loss may grow as they struggle with loss. First they may experience a renewal of their own spirituality. A significant loss may cause one to revisit their beliefs and construct, as a result, a more resilient spirituality. In addition, individuals may have a greater appreciation of life and their significant relationships and as a result reorder their priorities. Individuals may have a greater existential awareness – acknowledging the frailty of life.Their character may grow as well as they acknowledge new insights and recognize new strengths. As they take on unfamiliar tasks and assume additional roles, their skills may grow. Finally they may make changes in their own lifestyle – perhaps exercising or giving up tobacco.

5.4  Continuing bonds The Freudian notion that the work of grief is to detach from the deceased and reinvest in other relations has been strongly challenged in the past decade. Already in 1987, Attig compared letting go in grief to letting go of an adult child. By that Attig meant that even though there may be less physical presence, the connective bonds and sense of presence remain strong. Synthesizing other work, I suggested in the Encyclopedia of Death that, rather than emotionally withdraw, survivors might find ways to creatively retain their attachments to the loss object (Doka, 1984). Based on his research and re-conceptualization, Worden (1991), as addressed earlier, revised his wording of his tasks to emphasize that bond between the deceased and the survivor continues albeit in a different form. This challenge has found its fullest treatment in Klass, Silverman and Nickman’s (1996) groundbreaking book, Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief. The therapeutic challenge remains to recognize that not all attachments are positive. That is, in some cases, the bond that persists may now allow an acknowledgment of the loss or tie people to commitments, promises, or ways of behavior that inhibit personal growth and/or adjustment to the new reality created by the loss.

6  Current approaches to grief theory Current approaches to grief theory have incorporated these new understandings of grief within their models. In this section, we will review the Task Model, the Dual-Process Model, and Meaning Reconstruction as three of the more contemporary and utilized approaches to understanding grief. As stated earlier, Worden’s task model was a significant advance in grief theory – one that still resonates today. Worden’s Task Model offered an effective model for counselors to both assess issues that individuals struggled with as they dealt with loss as well as an approach that guided interventions. His work had heuristic value, as the task model has been applied to both life-threatening illness (Doka, 1996) and the dying process (Corr, 1992). In addition, Worden has shown that his model could incorporate new approaches to and understandings of grief. For example, in the first addition of the text, Worden’s (1981) fourth task was expressed as to withdraw emotional energy from the deceased and invest it in new relationships

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– drawing on Freud’s (1917) notion that grief involved a detachment from the loved object. However as new research emerged – some of it from Worden – showing that individuals retained a continuing relationship or bond with the deceased (see Klass, Silverman and Nickman, 1996; Silverman, Nickman and Worden, 1992), Worden revised that task to read: to find an enduring connection with the deceased in the midst of embarking on a new life (Worden, 2009). In addition, Worden also clarified his third task – to adjust to a new life – to include internal and spiritual adjustments rather than just external adjustments. In short, Worden’s Task Model still represents a very worthwhile and current model – in fact, one that has even been incorporated with another current model – the Dual-Process Model of Grief (Stroebe and Schut, 1999). The Dual-Process Model of Grief as proposed by Stroebe and Schut (1999) – two researchers from the Netherlands – looks at grieving as coping with two complementary sets of processes. One process is labeled ‘Loss-Oriented.’ Here the individual copes with the impact of the loss – coping with the ensuing grief. A second set of processes are described as ‘RestorationOriented.’ These processes relate to adjusting to a life now changed by the death. To Stroebe and Schut, individuals who are grieving effectively oscillate or go back and forth between these two processes. If they focus only on the loss, their grief may become chronic. If the focus is only on restoration, grief may be delayed. A brief case illustration may illustrate this oscillation. Mary, a widow in her 50s came to one session with me pleased that for the first time since her husband’s death some eight months earlier, she had balanced her checkbook. Later, she confessed, she reminded herself that she would never have had to do so if her husband were still alive. Another contemporary approach to grief centers on the reconstruction of meaning that is often necessitated by a significant loss (see, for example, Neimeyer, 2001). In this approach, a loss threatens a survivor’s sense of meaning. The survivors now have to reassess their beliefs and identities – redefining self as well as their place in a now changed world. Thus they have to reconstruct the narrative of their life in the face of the loss. Along with these approaches, we need to mention the work of Bonanno. Bonanno (2009) has stressed the fact that many bereaved individuals are resilient. That is, when these individuals experience a loss, they do grieve but the manifestations of grief are often minimal and do not disrupt or disable their performance of key social roles. Bonanno’s approach offers a corrective reminding theorists and counselors that while many individuals experience difficulties when a loss occurs, and others may have especially complicated reactions to loss, still others deal with loss in highly resilient ways.

7 Conclusion In the past forty years, the study of grief has grown and developed. We no longer view grief as a series of universal stages – rather we now see a continuum of reactions, very personal pathways that encompass the range of reactions individuals have to loss – from resilience to more complicated forms of grief. We recognize the variety of losses that can engender grief – not just a death. We realize how factors such as culture or gender can influence the process of grieving. We understand that grief is not about detachment but rather that we retain continuing bonds with people we loved. Finally we acknowledge that individuals not only cope with grief but that grief offers opportunities for significant growths. As new theories of grief develop, these theories fuel new therapeutic approaches. In many ways, the last four decades have seen a renaissance in the study of grief. Hopefully as therapists and counselors become more aware of these

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developments, the end result will be increasing understanding and validation for individuals struggling with grief and loss. Key words: bereavement, grief, grief theory, dual-process model, meaning reconstruction, task model

Notes 1 This chapter draws from other work of the author. See Doka (2001; 2006). 2 The decision to remove the ‘bereavement exclusion’ from DSM-5 was highly debated.

Further reading Kübler-Ross, E. (1969) On Death and Dying. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Though dated, Kübler-Ross’ volume was immensely influential in the field of grief studies by providing the stage theory for encountering grief, Neimeyer, R. A. (2001) Meaning Reconstruction and the Meaning of Loss. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Neimeyer explores the ways in which loss threatens a survivor’s sense of meaning and the process by which the bereaved reconstruct meaning. Sanders, C. (1989) Grief:The Mourning After: Dealing with Adult Bereavement. New York: Wiley. Based on empirical research, Sanders offers a substantive advancement in the field through her proposed phase theory for the process of grief. Stroebe, M. and Schut, H. (1999) ‘The Dual Process Model of Coping with Bereavement: Rationale and Description,’ Death Studies, 23(3), pp. 197–224. Stroebe and Schut provide the Dual-Process Model of Grief which explores grieving as coping with two complementary sets of processes: the ‘Loss-Oriented’ process and the ‘Restoration-Oriented’ process. Worden, J. W. (1991) Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy: A Handbook for Mental Health Professionals. 2nd Edition. New York: Springer. Worden’s Task Model offers an effective model for counselors to both assess issues that individuals struggled with as they dealt with loss as well as an approach that guided interventions.

Bibliography Attig, T. (1987) ‘Grief, Love and Separation,’ in: Corr, C. and Pacholski, R. (eds). Death: Completion and Discovery. Lakewood, OH: The Association for Death Education and Counseling, pp. 139–148. Becker, E. (1973) The Denial of Death. New York: Simon and Schuster. Bonanno, G. (2009) The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss. New York: Basic Books. Bowlby, J. (1980) Loss: Sadness and Depression.Volume 3. New York: Basic Books. Calhoun, L. and Tedeschi, R. (eds). (2006) Handbook of Posttraumatic Growth: Research and Practice. Mahwah, NJ: LawrenceErlbaum and Associates. Corr, C. A. (1992) ‘A Task-Based Approach to Coping with Dying,’ Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 24(2), pp. 81–94. Corr, C. A. (1993) ‘Coping with Dying: Lessons that We Should and Should not Learn from the Work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross,’ Death Studies, 17(1), pp. 69–83. Doka, K. J. (1984) ‘Grief,’ in: Kastenbaum, R. and Kastenbaum, B. (eds). Encyclopedia of Death. Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press. Doka, K. J. (ed). (1989) Disenfranchised Grief: Recognizing Hidden Sorrow. Lexington, MA. Lexington Press. Doka, K. J. (1996) ‘Coping with Life-Threatening Illness: A Task Model,’ Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 32(2), pp. 111–122.

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Understanding grief Doka, K. J. (2001) ‘Challenging the Paradigm: New Understandings of Grief,’ Grief Matters: The Australian Journal of Grief and Bereavement, 4(2), pp. 31–34. Republished in Doka, K. J. (ed). (2007) Living with Grief: Before and After the Death. Washington, DC: Hospice Foundation of America, pp. 87–102. Doka, K. J. (ed). (2002) Disenfranchised Grief: New Directions, Challenges, and Strategies for Practice. Champaign, IL: Research Press. Doka, K. J. (2006) ‘Fulfillment as Sanders’ Sixth Phase of Bereavement: The Unfinished Work of Catherine Sanders,’ Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 52(2), pp. 143–151. Doka, K. and Martin, T. (2010) Grieving Beyond Gender: Understanding the Ways Men and Women Grieve. Revised Edition. New York: Routledge. Freud, S. (1917) ‘Mourning and Melancholia,’ Translated by J. Riviere. Reprinted in Rieff, P. (ed). (1991) General Psychology Theory: Papers on Metapsychology. New York: Touchstone, pp. 164–180. Kastenbaum, R. (2009) Death, Society, and Human Experience. 10th Edition. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Klass, D. and Hutch, R. A. (1986) ‘Elisabeth Kübler-Ross as a Religious Leader,’ Omega, Journal of Death and Dying, 16(2), pp. 89–109. Klass, D., Silverman, P. and Nickman, S. (eds). (1996) Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief. Washington, DC: Taylor and Frances. Kübler-Ross, E. (1969) On Death and Dying. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kübler-Ross, E. and Kessler, D. (2005) On Grief and Grieving. Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the 5 Stages of Loss. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Lindemann, E. (1944) ‘The Symptomatology and Management of Acute Grief,’ American Journal of Psychiatry, 101(2), pp. 141–148. Martin, T. and Doka, K. J. (2000) Men Don’t Cry . . . Women Do: Transcending Gender Stereotypes of Grief. Philadelphia: Brunner/Mazel. Neimeyer, R. A. (2001) Meaning Reconstruction and the Meaning of Loss. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Parkes, C. M. (1972) Bereavement: Studies in Grief in Adult Life. New York: International Universities Press. Parkes, C. M. (2006) Love and Loss:The Roots of Grief and Its Complications. London: Routledge. Prend, A. (1997) Transcending Loss. New York: Berkeley Books. Rando, T. A. (1993) The Treatment of Complicated Mourning. Champaign, IL: Research Press. Raphael, B. (1984) The Anatomy of Bereavement: A Handbook for the Caring Professionals. London: Hutchinson. Sanders, C. (1989) Grief:The Mourning After: Dealing with Adult Bereavement. New York: Wiley. Schneider, J. (1994) Finding My Way: Healing and Transformation Through Loss and Grief. Colfax, WI: Seasons Press. Silverman, P., Nickman, S. and Worden, J. W. (1992) ‘Detachment Revisited: The Child’s Reconstruction of the Dead Parent,’ American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 62(4), pp. 494–503. Stroebe, M. and Schut, H. (1999) ‘The Dual Process Model of Coping with Bereavement: Rationale and Description,’ Death Studies 23(3), pp. 197–224. Sue, D. W. and Sue, D. (1999) Counseling the Culturally Different: Theory and Practice. 3rd Edition. New York: Wiley. Worden, J. W. (1981) Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy: A Handbook for Mental Health Professionals. New York: Springer. Worden, J. W. (1991) Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy: A Handbook for Mental Health Professionals. 2nd Edition. New York: Springer. Worden, J. W. (2009) Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy: A Handbook for Mental Health Professionals. 4th Edition. New York: Springer.

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PART II

Disposal of the dead Past, present, and future

5 SYMBOLIZING IMPERIAL AFFILIATION IN DEATH Case studies from the Inka empire (ad 1400–1532) Colleen Zori 1 Introduction The Inka, like other empires in prehistory, maintained diverse and multifaceted relationships with individuals in the provincial communities of their extensive realm (see Figure 5.1). Some territories were incorporated unwillingly through military conquest. Later ethnohistoric documents by native and Spanish authors chronicle persistent resistance to imperial rule and even outright revolt, leading to the replacement of local leaders by Inka representatives. Other measures taken to pacify rebellious populations included compulsory migration, with up to one-third of problematic provincial populations resettled elsewhere and replaced by Inka loyalists (Cieza de León, 1959 [1553]; D’Altroy, 2005). Other communities were integrated into the empire through diplomatic means. In such cases, local leaders were left in power and sometimes even saw their wealth and prestige augmented by the empire. Not all members of a community experienced equally the costs and benefits associated with the new political and economic relationships being forged with the empire.The period of Inka expansion and incorporation – from ad 1400 through the arrival of Europeans in 1532 – was thus one in which political affiliations were often highly contested, even within a single community. Andean archaeologists rely on material culture to explore the degree to which particular individuals, households, and communities participated in the Inka imperial project. Mortuary contexts are a key focus for investigating how local people represented their political affiliations, one of many aspects of social identity reflected in death and burial. I begin with a brief discussion of the notion of Inka acculturation and how mortuary ritual was an arena in which political affiliation was performed and made manifest to both the broader community and representatives of the Inka empire. Drawing primarily on pottery and other artifacts incorporated into tombs as grave goods, I then present three case studies documenting how the relationships maintained between local peoples and the Inka empire were symbolized in death. These case studies are drawn from diverse regions of the empire – the Calchaquí Valley of northwestern Argentina, the middle Locumba Valley of Southern Peru, and the Ica Valley on the central Peruvian coast – and demonstrate that provincial communities varied in the degree to which they held shared or internally divergent degrees of affiliation with the empire. I conclude by making the argument that a shared sense of either allegiance to or resistance against the Inka empire was particularly 43

Colleen Zori

Figure 5.1 Map of the extent of the Inka empire, as well as the locations of the archaeological sites mentioned in the text.

important in communities resettled by the empire. In these newly established settlements, consensus in political affiliation likely played an important role in forging relationships with other community members. At the same time, the degree to which such allegiances were shared across different social strata created both opportunities and limitations on how ties to the empire could be used to accrue social power.

2  Performing Inka affiliation in the ancient Andes For ancient empires like the Inka, the agenda of provincial incorporation and subsequent control did not require the imposition of imperial material culture on their subjects. The Inka had neither the need nor the desire to acculturate conquered peoples and turn them into 44

Symbolizing imperial affiliation in death

‘Inkas.’ In fact, the empire sought to forestall concerted efforts at resistance by mandating the maintenance of local ethnic distinctions in clothing, hair styles, and other forms of adornment (Cieza de León, 1959 [1553]; Cobo, 1979 [1653]). Nonetheless, various aspects of Inka culture – such as settlement organization, architecture, and material culture like ceramics and textiles, but also some social and religious practices – were embraced by some local peoples. Adoption or eschewal of imperial material culture on the part of provincial subjects was conditioned by a range of political and social motives (see discussion in Costin, 2016). A consideration of the nature and extent to which Inka-style objects were voluntarily incorporated into the lives – and deaths – of local peoples thus provides insights into attitudes toward the imperial state and their levels of participation in the state ideology. Provincial subjects were exposed to Inka material culture in a number of ways, varying primarily along the socioeconomic axis between commoners and elites. As a monetized economy never developed in the ancient Andes, taxation on Inka commoners comprised an obligation to provide labor to the state (D’Altroy, 2015). Examples include cultivating local agricultural lands owned by the Inka, conscription into temporary military service, or construction of statedirected infrastructure projects like roads, bridges, or civic-ceremonial architecture. Maintaining the ideological fiction that the only tribute demanded of subject populations was their labor (Moore, 1958; Murra, 1962), the Inka provided their subjects with food, maize beer (or chicha), clothing, and tools while working for the state. Periodically throughout the ritual calendar, festivals and other events of state-sponsored hospitality put gifts of ceramics, textiles, and other Inka-style goods in the hands of provincial subjects (see e.g. Bray, 2003). Although commoners in the Inka empire had variable degrees of access to imperial-style artifacts, such ties were often stronger for people in the elite echelon of society. Power in the Inka empire was operationalized through personal allegiances and had to be continually renegotiated with local leaders through rituals and feasting events. Provincial elites played a vital role in coordinating and managing the labor tribute demanded by the state, and derived some measure of their authority from their position vis-à-vis the new Inka political hierarchy.The Inka empire and its agents materialized these connections through the bestowal of gifts of fine textiles, elaborate ceramics, and personal adornments of gold and silver. Precious metals in particular were highly regulated through sumptuary laws and wearable only by express permission from the emperor himself (Betanzos, 1996 [1557]; Sallnow, 1989). Such items physically displayed the political persona of the leader and emphasized the network of imperial ties to which they owed their power. The distinctive objects of imperial material culture discussed above – particularly the Inkastyle ceramics integral to state sponsored commensal events, as well as fancy textiles and objects of gold and silver – were indelible symbols of the state. This was even the case for material culture produced at the provincial level but in the imperial style, or which hybridized local and Inka elements (see Costin, 2016). The adoption and use of these materializations of Inka imperialism conveyed an explicit message about the degree to which the user participated in the ideological project of the empire. Although we can never know how these provincial subjects actually felt, it is possible to assess the degree to which they outwardly performed fealty and affiliation to the Inka state and its representatives by exploring the nature of the imperial elements being adopted and the contexts of their use. Mortuary rituals in the ancient Andes were important social events and therefore constituted a key arena in which political affiliation – of both the deceased and those conducting the funerary activities – were performed and observed. Prehistoric societies of the Andes left behind ample archaeological and iconographic evidence of prolonged burial ceremonies that often involved large numbers of participants. Mortuary rituals provided a context for displaying the 45

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social identities of the deceased, along with the claims upon land, labor, and privilege that those entailed, effectively ‘project[ing] these roles into the timeless supernatural domain’ (Bawden, 1996: p. 225; see also Bloch, 1974). In the wake of a community member’s death, funerary rituals were also a locus for renegotiating relationships of authority and affiliation amongst the living (Thomas, 2000; McAnany, Storey and Lockard, 1999; Parker Pearson, 2000). It should be noted that the audiences involved in these mortuary performances of political affiliation were primarily local, comprising other members of the community, since Inka state officials only rarely visited most provincial settlements. Upon the death of a local leader ruling at the behest of the Inka, imperial-style goods may have been included in the tomb to call attention to those relationships and remind community members of the power of the empire underlying elite authority. Commoners might incorporate Inka-style objects into their tombs to signify their allegiance to such leaders and – albeit indirectly – to the Inka imperial state. Conversely, in situations in which public sentiment about the Inka was less than favorable, purposeful exclusion of Inka-style objects from tombs might be interpreted as a repudiation of imperial rule – or at the very least, the fact that such individuals or those responsible for their interment were not overtly performing their participation in or acceptance of Inka state ideology. Individuals and communities commemorated in death their affiliation – or lack thereof – with the Inka empire in many ways. The following three case studies illustrate the range of this variability. The first example is a community in the Calchaquí Valley of Argentina where members prioritized local identities at the expense of imperial ones in their choices of grave goods. The second example documents a settlement in the Locumba Valley of Southern Peru where artifacts symbolizing affiliation to the empire were included in the majority of tombs, equally as important as objects commemorating local pre-Inka traditions. A final example draws on data from the Ica Valley of central Peru and highlights how social class and degree of integration into the imperial power structure conditioned the incorporation of mortuary offerings in styles that ranged from local to hybrid provincial-imperial to purely Inka. Analysis of how provincial peoples made strategic decisions to include or exclude imperial-style ceramics provides insight into the role of material culture in shaping social relationships within the local community and with the agents of the overarching Inka empire.

3  The Calchaquí Valley, Argentina: prioritizing the local over the imperial One response to Inka incorporation was the maintenance and even strengthening of local identities, achieved in part through rejection of Inka symbols and material culture as grave goods. One example of such a counter-response has been investigated in the Calchaquí Valley of northwestern Argentina. Prior to Inka conquest in the fifteenth century, the valley was divided into numerous small chiefdom-level polities, each comprising one or more towns of several thousand people and a number of associated outlying villages (D’Altroy et al., 2000; D’Altroy, Williams and Lorandi, 2007). As the Inka expanded to incorporate the Calchaquí Valley, some of the communities allied with the Inka. This affiliation is suggested by the construction of Inka-style buildings within established indigenous towns, as well as the incorporation of Inka and localInka hybrid ceramics into domestic repertoires (Acuto, 2010; D’Altroy et al., 2000; D’Altroy, Williams and Lorandi, 2007; Ferrari, 2016).Voluntary affiliation with the Inka, however, was not unanimous and had consequences for the degree to which local people incorporated imperial styles into their lives and deaths. One example of a site where provincial inhabitants appear to have preferred the expression of local identities, at the expense of incorporating symbols of the Inka empire, is the site of 46

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Cortaderas (see Figure 5.2). Architectural remains at Cortaderas have been divided into four sectors – Alta, Bajo, Izquierda, and Derecha – that spread over several hilltops and the floodplain of an adjacent ravine. Cortaderas Alta is a defensible hilltop site that was occupied by local peoples prior to imperial incorporation. Following their standard practice upon conquest (see e.g. Arkush, 2017), the Inka partially destroyed Cortaderas Alta and moved the inhabitants down from this fortified location, thereby discouraging use of the site in fomenting rebellions. The Inka then established the Cortaderas Bajo and Cortaderas Izquierda sectors, comprising both domestic and civicceremonial rectilinear buildings in the distinctive imperial style, as well as storehouses and corrals (Acuto, 2010; Acuto, Troncoso and Ferrari, 2012; D’Altroy et al., 2000). The types of activities conducted here likely included administrative oversight, craft production, storage of agricultural products harvested from imperial lands, management of state herds of llamas used for transport, as well as feasting and state-sponsored hospitality services typical of Inka administrative centers. Evidence suggests that the Inka relocated the displaced population from Cortaderas Alta to the new site of Cortaderas Derecha, situated a little less than one kilometer to the south of the newly established imperial sectors of Cortaderas Bajo and Cortaderas Izquierda. Cortaderas Derecha is a modest settlement with domestic compounds in the local style surrounding a small central plaza. Radiocarbon dates, as well as the presence of Inka ceramics throughout the entire sequence of trash midden deposits, indicate that the site was constructed and built only after Inka conquest. Acuto (2010) suggests that this was a village ‘occupied by resettled local people, forced to live next to (and work for) the Inkas’ (p. 130) – likely the very people who were made to abandon Cortaderas Alta. In contrast with Calchaquí Valley settlements more closely allied with the Inka, in which imperial-style structures are built alongside those of local ones, the separate and ostensibly subordinate location of Cortaderas Derecha in relation to Cortaderas Bajo and Cortaderas Izquierda represents a ‘clear-cut segregation between the realms of the colonisers

Figure 5.2 The site of Cortaderas, showing the different sectors of the site and how they relate to each other in topographic space (image courtesy of Felix Acuto).

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and those of the colonised’ (Acuto, Troncoso and Ferrari, 2012: p. 1146). A prevalence of grinding stones and massive numbers of camelid bones recovered in excavations indicate that the residents of the site engaged in intensive crop processing and llama butchery, with the finished foodstuffs conveyed to the adjacent Inka sectors of Cortaderas Bajo and Cortaderas Izquierda (Acuto, Troncoso and Ferrari, 2012). The use of Inka material culture by the residents of Cortaderas Derecha reflects a high degree of ambivalence toward the Inka. Ceramics provide the most illustrative example. Elsewhere in the Calchaquí Valley, Inka ceramics are relatively scarce at sites outside of imperial centers. By contrast, they are found widely distributed throughout Cortaderas Derecha, appearing in every one of the households (Acuto, 2010). This finding suggests that the state provided residents with food and drink within these Inka vessels. What is significant is the ways in which these vessels were then treated. Sherds of broken Inka vessels were found pervasively throughout kitchen middens, suggesting that although the residents of Cortaderas Derecha used the vessels for mundane purposes, they ‘did not seem to have considered Inka vessels as a luxury or special good that they needed to treat with care’ (Acuto, 2010: p. 136).They instead discarded the vessels with other quotidian trash. What is even more telling is that Inka ceramics were never included in the tombs of the people buried at Cortaderas Derecha. Although the sample size of tombs is quite small, it is nonetheless significant that the only ceramic vessels that appear in graves are of the purely local Santamariana style. Neither imperial Inka nor local-Inka hybrid vessels were selected as appropriate accompaniments for the dead. Choices about material culture took on new political significance for local people who had been displaced and resettled by the Inka and whose labor was now being co-opted by the Inka state for the production and processing of food directed toward imperial needs. For the residents of Cortaderas Derecha, ‘ceramic style, pottery manufacture and use, and funerary rituals were not taken for granted anymore, but became conscious and intentional practices . . . the focus of practices of resistance’ (Acuto, 2010: p. 145). Even among those who may have served as leaders in the community and liaisons with the empire, the political affiliations stressed in death were explicitly local in character. Reference to the Inka was intentionally excluded. In the context of the community participation in funerary ritual, such choices would have reinforced norms and behaviors prioritizing loyalty to the group and rejection of imperial efforts at integration.

4  The Locumba Valley, Southern Peru: Inka affinity on the community level In contrast to the apparent rejection of Inka material culture displayed in the archeological evidence at Cortaderas Derecha, we also have cases where communities as a whole demonstrate outward affinity for Inka material culture.This affinity is exemplified by the site of Moqi, located at 1,200 meters above sea level in the Locumba Valley of Southern Peru, where near-ubiquitous placement of Inka ceramics in adult graves points to a strategic balance of memorializing the local and the imperial. Like Cortaderas Derecha, Moqi lacked an occupying population prior to Inka conquest and thus also represented a new community created by the imperial resettlement of people from the surrounding area. Also paralleling the Cortaderas site, there is a clear spatial division between the Inka and local sectors of the site, albeit not of quite so great a distance (see Figure 5.3). Moqi Alto comprises complexes of Inka-style rectilinear buildings, arrayed around several plazas of increasingly restricted access. Activities carried out here were administrative and ceremonial, including the preparation of food and drink for events of state-sponsored hospitality. Moqi Bajo 48

Figure 5.3 The location (left) and layout (right) of the site of Moqi. Note the physical separation of Moqi Alto and Moqi Bajo, located on adjacent hilltops and separated by a steep ravine (image courtesy of the Moqi Archaeological Project).

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is a residential sector with comparatively lower-quality architecture, primarily in the local style. Here, residents engaged in the production of ceramics and textiles as part of their labor obligations to the Inka state. The focal point of Moqi Bajo is a small hill that has been artificially leveled to form the Plaza Alta. The hilltop and surrounding hillsides were used as a cemetery, in which the inhabitants of Moqi interred their dead in the stone-lined cist tombs typical of the local pre-Inka tradition (see Figure 5.4). Additional cemeteries in other parts of the site may represent social divisions – such as kinship groups – among the people inhabiting Moqi. Excavations in four of these cemetery groupings have generated a sample of fourteen tombs that were either almost entirely or completely intact, and contained a total of seventeen adults (ten females, six males, and one unidentified), three juveniles, and eight infants/young children aged from birth to 2 years. Each of the adults buried at Moqi was accompanied by a typical assemblage of artifacts also found in pre-Inka graves from the region.These artifacts include a utilitarian cooking vessel, one or more bowls, and wooden spoons, all of which were produced in the local style. The tombs of females included hair combs and implements used in spinning, weaving, and sewing. Soot on the exterior of the cooking vessel, as well as scrape marks in the bottom of the bowl and wear on the edges of the spoon, indicate that these objects were used in life and most likely constitute the personal property of the deceased. These artifacts testify to some of the daily activities of the deceased individual, including the preparation and consumption of food, as well as specific

Figure 5.4  A stone-lined cist tomb from the site of Moqi.

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undertakings such as personal grooming and textile production. Although prestige artifacts such as semi-precious stone beads, metal bells, and elaborately carved wooden boxes indicate that some individuals had higher social status, the Moqi tombs on the whole emphasize community membership and a connection to a shared material tradition of local origin. A new message about political affiliation with the Inka empire, however, was laid atop the local identities symbolized by the typical grave good assemblage at Moqi. This was then broadcast to other community members and into the afterlife through funerary rituals. In distinct contrast to Cortaderas Derecha, Inka ceramics were comparatively pervasive in the interments at Moqi. Among the adults, imperial-style ceramics – including aribolas, plates, and cooking vessels – were found associated with all but three individuals, comprising 82% of all adults in the sample. This political identity was not necessarily imposed on the young. Inka ceramics were absent from the tombs of infants and young children. In fact, the residents of Moqi did not consider ceramics – whether local or imperial in style – appropriate funerary offerings for the youngest members of society. Excavators instead found gourd bowls and wooden plates, vessels that were much less likely to break in the hands of babies and children. In at least two cases, however, the wooden plates were carved to resemble Inka-style bowls/plates, indicating that the adults providing for these young individuals were priming them for future affiliation with the empire. Among the final demographic group, the juveniles, inclusion of Inka ceramics was variable, although this group was also the smallest and so patterns may be difficult to discern. Inka vessels were not included in the tombs of two individuals, aged 5 and 11 years, but were found in the tomb of a 12-year-old buried with weaving equipment and thus presumed to have been a female individual. This evidence could indicate that as individuals matured, perhaps at the point when they went through puberty, political affiliation became a more salient part of the personal identities to be symbolized in death. Moqi inhabitants also memorialized their affiliation to the empire by incorporating the tombs of their important dead into architecture built in the imperial style. One particular tomb provides a window into the intersection between mortuary practices and architectural construction proclaiming connections to the empire. The hilltop artificially leveled to form the Plaza Alta was used as a cemetery for an indeterminate length of time before the next phase, which entailed the construction of five rectangular buildings in a semi-circle around the edges (see Figure 5.3). These structures were significantly better built than the other architecture in Moqi Bajo and are similar in construction techniques to the Inka buildings in Moqi Alto, although the semi-circular arrangement is not typical of the Inka and suggests that the structures were built by the local inhabitants in a style imitating the imperial one. At least one of these buildings was built atop two of the earlier graves, with construction accompanied by one final ritual event. When laying out the wall, the architects recognized that they were building over an earlier grave. They commemorated this tomb by placing a small Inka vessel atop the capstone of the tomb and then pouring a layer of clean mud over top, over which they then built the wall. This had the effect of simultaneously sealing the tomb and incorporating it as the literal cornerstone of a new building constructed according to Inka architectural canons. Similarly to Cortaderas Derecha, the inhabitants of Moqi produced food resources for the empire. Although the primary crop grown today is oregano, the area surrounding Moqi was formerly well known for its excellent microclimate for growing corn. This site is also strategically positioned to control the largest expanses of arable land located in this part of the valley. Survey of the surrounding area suggests that terraces and canal systems were expanded in the late prehispanic period, and Moqi is riddled with small stone-lined cists that were most likely used for storage of the harvested corn before it could be conveyed to other imperial centers or put to use in feasting activities carried out at Moqi. Despite the fact that their role in the empire was 51

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comparable to that of the residents of Cortaderas Derecha, the inhabitants of Moqi appear to have maintained – at least outwardly – a relatively amicable relationship with the empire. Local traditions were maintained in terms of the inclusion of traditional pre-Inka assemblages of grave goods, but Inka vessels were proudly incorporated into the majority of adult tombs. This new community, comprised of people from the surrounding valley but who had never lived in the same place together, built a shared communal identity around their collective participation in the overarching Inka system. People were introduced to imperial stylistic norms over the course of their infancy and childhood, and later became full participants as they matured, finally commemorating these political affiliations in death.

5  The Ica Valley, central Peruvian coast: imperial affiliation shaped by social role In contrast to the community-wide rejection or memorialization of Inka political affiliation in death identified at Cortaderas Derecha and Moqi, the mortuary record of the Ica Valley provides evidence for a more variegated pattern of participation in the Inka imperial project. This is a product of two key factors that distinguish the Ica Valley from the two previous examples. The first is the greater degree of social stratification extant in the Ica Valley, both proceeding and under Inka rule. The second factor relates to whether and to what degree different members of Ica society were integrated into the imperial power structure. Assessment of the influence of these factors requires a brief consideration of the organization of the Ica Valley prior to Inka conquest of the region. Discussion then turns to how the four identifiable social classes – primary elite, secondary elite, civil servants, and commoners – of the Inka period differed in the incorporation of local, hybrid local-imperial, and Inka-style objects in their tombs. To understand the configuration of affiliations in the Ica Valley during the period of imperial rule, we should first consider what conditions were like there prior to Inka conquest. The Ica Valley was an integrated political entity with its center at Ica Vieja, a dispersed collection of ceremonial mounds of adobe bricks surrounded by residential neighborhoods and several large cemeteries. Although pre-Inka society was stratified, with elites living in elaborate adobe-brick residences and buried in large chamber tombs deep beneath the surface, it is notable that high quality fineware pottery in the Ica style was found in the tombs of individuals of all social classes (Conlee et al., 2004; Menzel, 1976). In her classic study of mortuary ceramics in the valley, Dorothy Menzel (1976, p. 233) notes, The uniform use of fancy Ica 6 pottery by rich and poor alike in all parts of the valley and all kinds of settlements is an indication that the entire community shared equally in the character, use and high quality of its art. This community of art cuts across the difference in wealth and privilege between the nobility and the rest of the people of Ica. Although Ica nobles enjoyed a greater quantity of grave goods and a more elaborate series of mortuary rituals than were performed for commoners, people across the social spectrum were nonetheless unified by a strong sense of Ica identity that was made manifest in death by the inclusion of vessels in a shared local ceramic tradition in their tombs. Conquest by the Inka brought significant social changes to the Ica Valley, reflected in the tombs from the period. A sample of thirteen tombs of different social statuses from Ica Vieja, as well as a number of tombs from several outlying settlements, provides insight into Inka rule and how it transformed the organization of Ica society (Menzel, 1976). I begin here with the elite 52

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strata of Ica society. Because of the centralized political structure already operating in the Ica Valley, the Inka left the local nobility in place to rule. At the same time, the empire constructed a small number of imperial-style buildings in one sector of Ica Vieja, together comprising an Inka administrative outpost of sorts (Menzel, 1959). At least eight elite tombs were identified at Ica Vieja, notable for the material evidence of their connections to the empire. Four of the tombs represent the highest echelon of the Ica elite. These tombs contained personal adornments of both gold and silver, metals whose display was rigidly controlled by the imperial sumptuary laws. The Inka state bestowed the privilege of wearing such objects on these individuals, a fact that would not have escaped those observing them in either life or death. An additional symbol of imperially granted privilege found in an elite tomb at Ica Vieja and another looted tomb from a site elsewhere in the valley was a wooden stool. Such stools were bestowed upon provincial nobles by the Inka, with the rank of the individual indicated by the height of the stool they were entitled to use, the material from which it had been made, and the degree of which it had been decorated (Guaman Poma de Ayala, 2009 [1615/1616]; Rowe, 1947). A stool of simple wood about 10 cm in height, such as the one found in the Ica Valley tombs, was the symbol of rank for nobles in charge of 100 households.The gold and silver objects included in the Ica tombs, as well as the wooden stools, were vital components of the political persona of the local elite under the Inka and visibly manifest their connections to the empire during funerary rituals. Ceramics were yet another important element in projecting the political affinity of Ica elites in death, sending a somewhat more nuanced message than the inclusion of items obtained directly from the empire. Although elite tombs sometimes also included ceramics in the local style, they were much more likely to contain two other styles. First, elite tombs included vessels produced locally but imitating imperial stylistic canons, known as Provincial Inka wares. Second, elite tombs included vessels that combine elements of Inka ceramic forms and design elements influenced by the local pre-Inka tradition into completely new types of vessels, designated as the Ica-Inka style. Produced in imperial workshops, these Provincial Inka wares speak to a direct connection with the Inka state, while the Ica-Inka-style ceramics symbolize something more complicated. As noted by Menzel (1976), ‘[t]he style features of Ica-Inca vessels make it clear that these vessels were meant to symbolize traditional prestige of the Ica elite, but as sanctioned and reconfirmed by the Incas’ (pp. 236–7). Found only in the tombs of the elites, the hybrid Ica-Inca ceramic style became the symbolic manifestation of the new power dynamic in which the Ica lords were elevated above their local constituents, forming a distinct ruling class through their amalgamation with the Inka. A second class of nobility was also symbolized in Ica tombs, reflective of new positions in the social hierarchy emerging under Inka rule. The tombs of these individuals were neither as deep nor as large as those of the highest elite, although still significantly more elaborate than the tombs of commoners. These tombs contained objects of silver, indicative of their bestowal by the emperor, but never gold. Although Ica-Inca ceramics were included in the tombs of these secondary elite, Provincial Inka wares were consistently absent from these tombs, indicating that ‘second-ranking nobles did not have direct dealings with the Inca state. If so, their activities must have been entirely under the jurisdiction of the higher-ranking Ica nobility’ (Menzel, 1976: p. 236). One additional new social class owed its emergence to the Inka state: civil servants attached to the empire. The tombs of individuals who acted as bureaucrats for the Inka are characterized by interplay between traditional symbols of local identity and objects symbolizing the status accrued by the individual through their direct connection to the empire. Mortuary evidence suggests that although of local origin, these people were not part of the traditional Ica nobility. The individuals were not buried as deep, and lacked the chamber tombs and requisite objects 53

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of gold and silver characteristic of Ica elite burials. Instead, they were interred in burial urns, as had been typical of Ica in the pre-Inka period and which continued to characterize commoner burials in the Inka period. The inclusion of numerous grave goods in the local style indicates a person of moderately good social standing within the Ica social hierarchy (Menzel, 1976). The prevalence and nature of the imperial-style objects included in the tomb, however, indicate that the individual occupied a unique position vis-à-vis the empire. Ica-Inka ceramics – the symbol of a new category of rulers emergent from a powerbase combining local and Inka elements – were unsurprisingly absent from these graves. They were instead filled with Provincial Inka ceramics, as well as imperial vessels so fine that they are likely to have been imported from Cuzco, the Inka capital. Other important objects included in the tombs of civil servants were gained through a direct connection with the empire. Examples include wooden cups called keros, found in pairs, and at least three knotted string devices used for record keeping, known as khipus. Pairs of keros were an important emblem of Inka diplomacy. They were used in a highly symbolic act of toasting, in which the Inka or his representative used one and the local leader drank from another, effectively sealing the alliance between provincial communities and the empire (Cummins, 2002).The pairs of cups were left with local communities for use only in events of state-sponsored hospitality, and served as a reminder of the benefits but also the obligations entailed in relationships with the empire. Khipus are knotted string devices that were used by the Inka and their representatives in a variety of ways, but primarily to register census data and record taxation of the provinces (see Urton, 2003; 2017).The keros and khipus, combined with the Provincial and Cuzco Inka ceramics, testify to the fact that ‘some non-noble individuals of modest distinction in Ica society acquired an additional, independent prestige position in the Inca hierarchy’ (Menzel, 1976: p. 231). Finally, consideration of the commoner tombs from the Ica Valley provides additional insights into the local reactions toward Inka rule there. Tombs of individuals outside of the elite ranks maintained a strong connection to local Ica traditions, both in terms of form and content. Urn burials continued unabated, and the ceramics included in commoner tombs are almost exclusively in the local style. Perhaps even more interesting is a novel interest in antique Ica vessels during the period of Inka rule. Commoner tombs often include vessels from a considerably earlier time period or which replicate the form and decoration of earlier local ceramic styles. Menzel (1976: p. 241) notes, The antiques selected for collection and as models for imitation are confined to the early half of the Ica tradition, including style phases or vessel categories not particularly distinguished by artistic or technical excellence. This observation strengthens the impression that this antiquarianism does not reflect primarily admiration for the high quality of the earlier art. Rather, it appears to have been an expression of a desire to return to earlier, better days, when the Ica Valley was free from pressure or domination by foreign powers. This renewed interest in pre-Inka Ica styles was manifest only in the tombs of commoners, where it was observed in all but one of the tombs in the sample. Such vessels are absent from the tombs of the upper tiers of society, which provides support for the assertion that the antique phenomenon ‘was probably a particular expression of protest by these lower orders against the social cleavage brought to Ica by Inca rule, and against the deprivation of access to Ica prestige art by the people of the lower ranks’ (Menzel, 1976: p. 241). Under Inka rule, there was significant variation in the degree to which people in the Ica Valley felt an allegiance toward the empire and materialized those relationships in mortuary 54

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contexts. Political affiliation was strongly conditioned by social status. Although hierarchies existed in the pre-Inka period, the population of Ica shared a strong sense of identity that cross-cut social classes and was materialized in the inclusion of fine Ica pottery in the tombs of all denizens of the valley. Under the Inka, social divisions widened. The nobility was now distinguished by exclusive privileges obtained directly from the empire, such as the right to wear gold and silver or sit upon wooden stools. Perhaps even more significant was that certain types of pottery were now off limits to the majority of Ica people, particularly the Ica-Inka style. This new style hybridized design elements of both the imperial and Ica traditions to create a novel style embodying the new power that local lords wielded in conjunction with the empire. In addition to ruling through the Ica nobility, the Inka also employed a group of civil servants. These individuals owed their elevated social status to their connection to the empire, symbolized by the inclusion of imperial objects emblematic of Inka diplomacy (keros) and governance (khipus) in their tombs. The civil servants were given privileged access to ceramics of the imperial style, perhaps even from Cuzco itself, although these might be read as a more direct statement of imperial domination than the degree of collaboration or accommodation that is implied by the Ica-Inka hybrid style. Finally, commoners in the Ica Valley appear to have elected to symbolize affiliations that were decidedly local in flavor. The absence of imperial-style pottery or artifacts (whether an intentional choice or because commoners did not have access to such goods) was underlined by a new emphasis on Ica ceramics of earlier periods, with people actively seeking out and imitating antique vessels that harkened back to a time before the Inka. Among these Ica residents, display of local vessels both contemporaneous and vintage in the course of mortuary ritual would have reinforced membership in a traditionally unified community, one that may have felt besieged in a social world undergoing rapid transformation under the Inka.

6  Discussion and conclusions: death and politics in the Inka empire Imperialism, whether during the phase of conquest or subsequent incorporation and administration, is a context in which provincial populations intensely negotiate political affiliation. Local responses to Inka expansion ranged from acceptance and alliance to rebellion and attempts to throw off the yoke of Inka domination. As argued here, mortuary ritual, and more specifically the material culture selectively incorporated into tombs as grave goods, provided an arena in which provincial peoples made intentional statements about their affiliation (or lack thereof) to the Inka empire. In at least some cases, as seen with Cortaderas Derecha and Moqi, there appears to have been at least some degree of consensus within the community about how to include Inka-style pottery among tomb offerings. Funerals would have been a forum for making these statements of allegiance publically, on behalf of the deceased as well as those still living. Burial ceremonies also served to normalize and propagate community attitudes toward the Inka in a highly ritualized context. In other places, such as the Ica Valley, people’s experience of empire differed widely from one another: some people gained access to material benefits through the empire, while others were purposefully excluded.The very different ways that people of divergent social statuses articulated with the empire are reflected in the affiliations – whether local, imperial, or a new category amalgamating the two – that are symbolized in their tombs. Although there was internal consistency within each of the distinct levels of the Ica social hierarchy, differential integration into the imperial administrative system destroyed the shared stylistic tradition that transcended differences in wealth and power prior to Inka conquest. Among the many differences between the three case studies chosen, one factor that influenced the way in which communities either came together or developed greater gulfs between 55

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distinct social strata is whether the provincial populations experienced resettlement in a new location. It is notable that the inhabitants living and burying at Cortaderas Derecha and Moqi had both been resettled in locations with no pre-Inka habitation. No matter if such migrations were voluntary or coerced, life in these new Inka settlements required the formation of novel social relationships, both internally within the community and externally with the overarching political institution of the Inka empire. Under such tumultuous social conditions, forging a new community may have been facilitated through the development of a shared attitude – whether negative or positive – about the Inka. In this way, the symbolization of political allegiance in the tombs of individuals in these new settlements was only partially about affiliating with or rejecting the empire. Instead, choices regarding the inclusion or exclusion of imperial goods in tombs were more important for signaling the membership of the deceased in the newly formed community in which they had lived and died. An outgrowth of shared community norms regarding attitudes about the empire were constraints on the degree to which local people could accrue benefits based on their individual connections to the Inka state. Among the people at Cortaderas Derecha, one outcome of the unequivocally local focus of the mortuary ritual is that it would have limited the ability of certain residents to capitalize on their connections to the empire to gain increased social status, since Inka goods and the connections that they embodied were systematically devalued among residents of Cortaderas Derecha. Affiliation with the empire was not a pathway to power among these provincial people. In a similar sense, but for the opposite reason, the ethos of a shared connection to the empire observed at Moqi also curtailed the ability of any one individual to derive authority from their connection to the empire. Everyone had some degree of association with the Inka state, and so this could not become the foundation for social elevation for a select group of people. It is not clear whether the differences in the ceramics and other artifacts observed in the tombs of the Ica Valley represent the imposition of imperial policies that strongly controlled which social strata had access to Inka goods. But if it was indeed the product of an intentional Inka strategy, one goal may have been to create a degree of divisiveness that had been absent in the pre-Inka period. As noted above, Ica Vieja was the capital of a centralized polity spanning the entire Ica Valley. Although differences in wealth existed, the continuum of social strata was united by a shared stylistic tradition that was symbolized by the inclusion of Ica finewares in tombs of all social statuses. The Inka may have recognized that a unified Ica Valley represented a potential threat to their rule, and applied the classic imperial strategy of ‘divide and conquer.’ The seeds of division based on wealth and status were already in place. Inka sumptuary laws, coupled with control over which ceramic styles were accessible to which social groups, would have created an even greater gulf between the socioeconomic classes. The Ica nobility reacted by incorporating into their tombs ceramics in the Ica-Inka hybrid style, as well as other more overt symbols of authority within the Inka realm. They committed fully to engagement with imperial symbols to display authority. Ceramics in the local style were rare in the tombs of the highest elites, indicating that these affiliations were no longer valued enough to be symbolized in death. Among the Ica commoners, by contrast, there appears to have been a strengthening of pride in local ceramic styles and forms, particularly those recalling a time before the Inka. Incorporation of these vessels in mortuary contexts sent an overt message of local affiliation to other members of the community. The Inka empire was short-lived, lasting only about 150 years before collapsing under the multiple onslaughts of Old World diseases, internal factionalization, and Spanish military conquest. Both Cortaderas Derecha and Moqi were abandoned shortly after the Inka empire fell, dissolving communities that had been created at the will of the empire. Once the Inka were 56

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gone, so too was the basis for the shared political affiliation – whether for the Inka or against them – of the community. It is notable, however, that habitation continued at Ica Vieja and other sites in the Ica valley. Moreover, the ceramics of the Early Colonial period demonstrate that elite engagement with the Inka imperial-style had been the product of political expediency: all Inka influences were purged from Ica ceramics, which saw a return to local stylistic features in ceramics found in tombs of all social statuses (Menzel, 1976). This suggestive transformation indicates that mortuary ritual remained an important arena for the projection of political affiliation in the Ica Valley, even after the Inka were gone. Key words: Inka empire, imperialism, political affiliation, community cohesion

Acknowledgments My research at Moqi was conducted in conjunction with my co-director Lic. Jesús Gordillo Begazo, and was funded in part by the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA. My gratitude to Niamh Carty and Barra O’Donnabhain, who carried out the tomb excavations at Moqi and performed the osteological analyses of the associated skeletal materials. Felíx Acuto graciously provided his image of the Cortaderas site. Thanks also to Candi K. Cann for the invitation to participate in this volume.

Further reading Acuto, F. (2010) ‘Living Under the Imperial Thumb in the Northern Calchaquí Valley, Argentina,’ in: Malpass, M. and Alconini, S. (eds). Distant Provinces of the Inka Empire: Toward a Deeper Understanding of Inka Imperialism. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, pp. 109–151. This chapter combines various lines of archaeological evidence – settlement layout, architecture, ceramics, and mortuary practices – to investigate differences in how local people dealt with incorporation into the Inka empire. Bray, T. (2003) ‘The Commensal Politics of Early States and Empires,’ in: Bray, T. (ed). The Archaeology and Politics of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, pp. 1–16. By focusing on the form and function of the different Inka-style vessels and how the distribution of distinct vessel types varies between the provinces and the imperial heartland, this article provides insight into the role of food, drink, and pottery in Inka strategies of governance. Costin, C. (2016) ‘Crafting Identities Deep and Broad: Hybrid Ceramics on the Late Prehispanic North Coast of Peru,’ in: Costin, C. (ed). Making Value, Making Meaning: Techné in the Pre-Columbian World. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, pp. 319–359. This chapter comprises a detailed analysis of ceramics combining both local and imperial characteristics, exploring the role of material culture in the complex processes of accommodation, resistance, and identity formation entailed in imperial incorporation. Menzel, D. (1959) ‘The Inca Occupation of the South Coast of Peru,’ Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 15(2), pp. 125–142. Comparing changes in settlement patterns, architecture, and material culture between the Pisco and Chincha valleys, this article argues that Inka investment in any particular location was conditioned by the degree of political complexity extant prior to conquest. Menzel, D. (1976) Pottery Style and Society in Ancient Peru: Art as a Mirror of History in the Ica Valley, 1350– 1570. Los Angeles: University of California Press. This book is a classic study documenting the connections between grave goods and political affiliation in the ancient Andes, and how these were transformed upon incorporation into the Inka empire.

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Bibliography Acuto, F. (2010) ‘Living Under the Imperial Thumb in the Northern Calchaqui Valley, Argentina,’ in: Malpass, M. and Alconini, S. (eds). Distant Provinces of the Inka Empire: Toward a Deeper Understanding of Inka Imperialism. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, pp. 109–151. Acuto, F., Troncoso, A. and Ferrari, A. (2012) ‘Recognising Strategies for Conquered Territories: A Case Study from the Inka North Calchquí Valley,’ Antiquity, 86(334), pp. 1141–1154. Arkush, E. (2017) ‘The End of Ayawiri: Abandonment at an Andean Hillfort of the Late Intermediate Period,’ Journal of Field Archaeology, 42(3), pp. 241–257. Bawden, G. (1996) The Moche. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Betanzos, J. (1996 [1557]) Narrative of the Incas. Translated by R. Hamilton and D. Buchanan. Austin: University of  Texas Press. Bloch, M. (1974) ‘Symbols, Song, Dance and Features of Articulation: Is Religion an Extreme form of Traditional Authority?,’ Archive of European Sociology, 15, pp. 55–81. Bray, T. (2003) ‘The Commensal Politics of Early States and Empires,’ in: Bray, T. (ed). The Archaeology and Politics of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, pp. 1–16. Cieza de León, P. (1959 [1553]) The Incas of Pedro de Cieza de León. Translated by H. De Onis. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Cobo, B. (1979 [1653]) History of the Inca Empire: An Account of the Indians’ Customs and their Origin,Together with a Treatise on Inca Legends, History, and Social Institutions.Translated by R. Hamilton. Austin: University of Texas Press. Conlee, C., Dulanto, J., Mackey, C. and Stanish, C. (2004) ‘Late Prehispanic Sociopolitical Complexity,’ in: Silverman, H. (ed). Andean Archaeology. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 209–236. Costin, C. (2016) ‘Crafting Identities Deep and Broad: Hybrid Ceramics on the Late Prehispanic North Coast of Peru,’ in: Costin, C. (ed). Making Value, Making Meaning: Techné in the Pre-Columbian World. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, pp. 319–359. Cummins, T. (2002) Toasts with the Inca: Andean Abstraction and Colonial Images on Quero Vessels. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. D’Altroy, T. (2005) ‘Remaking the Social Landscape: Colonization in the Inka Empire,’ in: Stein, G. (ed). The Archaeology of Colonial Encounters. Albuquerque, NM: SAR Press, pp. 263–295. D’Altroy, T. (2015) ‘Funding the Inka Empire,’ in: Shimada, I. (ed). The Inka Empire: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 97–118. D’Altroy,T., Lorandi, A. M.,Williams,V., Calderari, M., Hastorf, C., DeMarrais, E. and Hagstrum, M. (2000) ‘Inka Rule in the Northern Calchaqui Valley, Argentina,’ Journal of Field Archaeology, 27(1), pp. 1–26. D’Altroy, T., Williams,V. and Lorandi, A. M. (2007) ‘The Inkas in the Southlands,’ in: Burger, R., Morris, C. and Matos Mendieta, R. (eds). Variations in the Expression of Inka Power. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, pp. 85–133. Ferrari, A. A. (2016) ‘Espacialidad Local e Inka en el Valle Calchaquí (Salta, Argentina): Reevaluando el Alcance de la Intervención Imperial en La Paya,’ Estudios Atacameños, 53, pp. 55–72. Guaman Poma de Ayala, F. (2009 [1615/1616]) The First New Chronicle and Good Government: On the History of the World and the Incas up to 1615. Translated by R. Hamilton. Austin: University of Texas Press. McAnany, P., Storey, R. and Lockard, A. (1999) ‘Mortuary Ritual and Family Politics at Formative and Early Classic K’Axob, Belize,’ Ancient Mesoamerica, 10, pp. 129–146. Menzel, D. (1959) ‘The Inca Occupation of the South Coast of Peru,’ Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 15(2), pp. 125–142. Menzel, D. (1976) Pottery Style and Society in Ancient Peru: Art as a Mirror of History in the Ica Valley, 1350– 1570. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Moore, S. F. (1958) Power and Property in Inca Peru. Morningside Heights, NY: Columbia University Press. Murra, J.V. (1962) The Economic Organization of the Inka State. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Parker Pearson, M. (2000) The Archaeology of Death and Burial. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press. Rowe, J. H. (1947) ‘Inca Culture at the Time of the Spanish Conquest,’ in: Steward, J. (ed). Handbook of South American Indians.Volume 2. Washington, DC: Bureau of American Ethnology, Government Printing Office, pp. 183–330.

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Symbolizing imperial affiliation in death Sallnow, M. J. (1989) ‘Precious Metals in the Andean Moral Economy,’ in: Parry, J. and Bloch, M. (eds). Money and the Morality of Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 209–231. Thomas, J. (2000) ‘Death, Identity and the Body in Neolithic Britain,’ The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 6(4), pp. 653–668. Urton, G. (2003) Signs of the Inka Khipu. Austin: University of Texas Press. Urton, G. (2017) Inka History in Knots: Reading Khipus as Primary Sources. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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6 THE ROMANIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH AND ISSUES OF CREMATION1 Marius Rotar

1 Introduction The popular Romanian movie director Sergiu Nicolaescu died in Bucharest at the age of 83 on January 3, 2013. His movies enjoyed considerable success before and after the collapse of the communist regime in Romania (1989). In fact, two of his movies (Nea Mărin Miliardar and Mihai Viteazul) took first and third place in an all-time box office ranking (Cele mai, 2005). Shortly after his death, scandal erupted when the family decided to cremate his body in accordance with the director’s wishes. Nicolaescu was not the first, or the last Romanian opting for cremation.Yet his popularity drew considerable attention to the controversy.The family requested a religious service from the Romanian Orthodox Church.After 6 hours of negotiation with the family (De ce, 2013), the Romanian Orthodox Patriarchy refused their request. In accordance with the anti-cremation decisions of its Synods from 1928, 1933, and 2012, the Romanian Orthodox Patriarchy asked the family to inhume the body.The Patriarchy offered to pay for half of the funeral expenses and asked the local authorities to offer a last resting place in a cemetery from Bucharest (Sergiu, 2013). As the scandal unfolded, cremation became a popular subject of debate in the Romanian media. Upon reflection, the topic of cremation was totally unknown to a majority of the Romanian population. This fact is paradoxical since the modern practice of cremation had at that time a history of almost nine decades in Romania (the first cremation took place on January 25, 1928).

2  Cremation in modern Romania: facts, statistics, and history About 70,000 people were cremated in Romania from 1928–2016. According to the data offered by the Asociaţia Cremaţionistă Amurg (Amurg, the Romanian Cremation Association), only 2–3% of total cremation were members of the elite of their times, which proves that the practice of cremation was democratic in Romania. Some of the members of the Romanian elite who were incinerated were first rank personalities in the public life. According to Association Amurg, among them were 50 academicians, 111 actors, 151 generals, thirty-nine ministers or other equivalent dignities, 245 academic teachers in all the important academic centres in Romania, etc. (Români, 2015). Thus, the Orthodox rhetoric was exaggerated in the case of Sergiu Nicolaescu because they asked the family to disrespect his wish for cremation in order to maintain his good reputation in the Romanian public consciousness. 60

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The rejection of cremation by the Romanian Orthodox Church began in the second half of the nineteenth century. This position was not too intense prior to the beginning of the First World War because cremation was a reality external to the Romanian territories. A few papers from Romanian Orthodox magazines may be cited, without leading to a general action (see, for instance, Mangâru, 1913). This situation occurred in spite of the fact that the ideas of cremation developed in Romania due to the efforts of the elite of that time (in the beginning the doctors, for reasons of public hygiene, see the misma theory, for instance). In 1876, 1905, and 1913, the establishment of a Romanian cremation society had no success. The Romanian cremationists until 1914 were idealists, believing that the Romanian Orthodox Church was in the process of accepting the practice of cremation. The writings of Constantin I. Istrati are significant from this point of view (Istrati, 1877: pp. 150–152). A leading figure in Romanian public life, as President of the Romanian Academy from 1913 to 1916, chemist, physician, and also minister, Istrati was however not so well known as an advocate of cremation.The Orthodox opposition to cremation reached its peak in the interwar period when the Cenuşa Crematorium was opened in Bucharest in 1928. The Orthodox opposition to cremation was not so intense at the beginning of the Second World War and only sporadic during the communist period. After 1990, due to the resurgence of religious influence in Romanian society (mainly Orthodox), the anti-cremationist Orthodox position reemerged. The opening of the Cenuşa Crematorium (Ashes) in 1928 represented a premiere in the Balkans and in a country with a majority Orthodox population. The Soviet case (where most of the population was Orthodox) was different, because the opening of the first crematorium from Moscow, in 1927, represented an action coordinated by the political power, in order to undermine the Orthodox Church and the traditions. The success of cremation in Romania in the inter-war period could be considered the result of the free initiative coming from the inside of the society and not imposed to it. This situation was the result of the efforts of the Cenuşa Society, founded on March 7, 1923, in Bucharest. The explicit aim of the society was to aid the incineration expenses of its members, and to create an insurance system for the descendants of its members (Anteproiect, 1935: pp. 3–5).The society, cooperating with the City Hall of Bucharest, managed to build the crematorium in less than three years (1925–1928).The number of the members increased from fourteen in 1923 to 1,124 in 1940 (Popovici, 1940: p. 2). Unlike other states in the area, the interval between the establishment of the Cenuşa Society (1923) and the opening of the crematorium (1928) was very short. The situations from Serbia and Hungary could be invoked in this aspect (Table 6.1). This situation has two explanations. First, it was about the interest of the City Hall of Bucharest in opening a crematorium for the incineration of the bodies which were not claimed by families or the bodies of deceased newborn children. Thus, the City Hall of Bucharest offered to the Cenuşa Society the land for the crematorium, and a series of subventions for its building and functioning in the beginning. Most of the incinerations were social cases during the first years of operation. The facility burned four bodies at one time in order to minimize Table 6.1 Comparison between Hungary, Serbia, and Romania on the implementation of cremation.

Hungary Serbia Romania

Foundation of first Cremation Society

First cremation

1904 1904 1923

1951 (Debrecen) 1964 (Belgrad) 1928 (Bucharest)

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expenses for society. This practice ceased after a series of criticisms from the Romanian Orthodox Church. The cessation of these cluster incinerations caused significant financial difficulties to the society. The second explanation is the force of the Cenuşa Society, having among its members some well-known Romanian personalities of those times. Their ranks included Grigore Trancu Iaşi (1874–1940), PhD professor and the Labour Minister; Ion Costinescu (1871–1951), mayor of Bucharest and Minister of Public Health; Gheorghe Gheorghian, mayor of Bucharest; Radu D. Rosetti (1874–1964), epigrams writer and influential lawyer; and David Emmanuel (1854– 1941), mathematician and member of the Romanian Academy. In fact, the support of the society by the City Hall of Bucharest was a consequence of the prestige of the members. The inauguration of the crematorium took place on January 25, 1928, although the construction was not finalized until 1934. The facility had no doors, windows, or a roof on the date of inauguration. The delivery of the incinerator and the eagerness of the Romanian cremationists led to the early inauguration. Due to its unique architectural style and to its historical significance, the Cenuşa Crematorium was declared a patrimonial monument in 2011.

3  Cremation in contemporary Romania Following the controversy surrounding Nicolaescu’s case, the number of cremations in Romania has increased only minimally in recent years (Table 6.2).The public lacked any attraction for the cause of the cremation in Sergiu Nicolaescu’s case. Rather it supported the respect of the private choice of an individual. The Romanian Orthodox Church’s intervention with the cremation plans for Nicolaescu was not new at all. In a similar case, the family of famous Romanian singer Cristian Paţurcă did not respect his final wishes for cremation as a result of pressure from the Romanian Orthodox Church (Cristian, 2011). The Romanian Orthodox Church has recently opposed private Romanian initiatives for building crematories.When the project RDK Cremation tried to open a crematorium in 2013 in Cluj Napoca, the local priests and the Metropolitan Andrei Andreicuţ played an important role in blocking the project (Mitropolia, 2012). The Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church responded to these recent attempts to open private crematories in Transylvania by reconsidering the issue of cremation in 2012 and reconfirming its decisions from 1928 and 1933. This 2012 Synod revealed some changes in the Romanian Orthodox Church’s position on cremation when compared with Synods from the inter-war period. Yet the core of the decision remains the same: cremation is strongly rejected (Hotărârile, 2012). In the preamble to its decision, the Synod in 2012 officially recognized that some defrocked Orthodox priests performed religious services for Orthodox believers who opted for cremation. These defrocked priests, it said, took advantage of the ignorance of Orthodox believers regarding the issue of cremation. Arguably, this is an error of interpretation on the part of the Synod,

Table 6.2 The number of cremations from the Vitan Bârzeşti crematorium (Bucharest) (Registru, 2016). Vitan Bârzeşti Crematorium cremations: 2011–2016 Year: Cremations:

2011 840

2012 859

2013 839

62

2014 791

2015 862

2016 939

The Romanian Orthodox Church and cremation

because it was not only defrocked priests who performed religious services for cremations: there is significant evidence that regular Orthodox priests did so as well (Hotărârile, 2012). The Romanian Orthodox Synod’s 2012 decision differs from the 1928 and 1933 Synod’s in four additional ways. First, the 2012 Romanian Orthodox Church Synod recognizes that some Western Christian denominations accept cremation. Second, the 2012 Synod mentions the Orthodox pastoral mission duty to catechize against cremation. Third, the 2012 Synod recognizes that the option for cremation is financially cheaper than inhumation. Finally, if the cremation was made against the will of the deceased for financial reasons or because it took place in another country, then the local bishop may give permission for a religious service, due to the principle of iconomy (Hotărârile, 2012; on the iconomy see Iconomy, 1999). When compared with the inter-war period, the Romanian Orthodox Church now uses new themes in its arguments against cremation.They invoke the concept of secularization and blame other Western Christian denominations (Catholics) for deviation from the traditional teaching of Christianity by accepting various lay ‘deviations and trends’ such as cremation.The Romanian Orthodox Church considered this as an explanation for the fact that Western countries have less church attendance and a higher percentage of non-religious people. Another new theme is the association of cremation with the act of euthanasia, as a tool to convince the public in Romania not to accept incineration. They make this connection based on the claim that the person who voluntarily opts for cremation gives up the possibility of redemption (Gordon, 2013). At the same time, the Romanian Orthodox Church has started to open its own chapels for funeral services, as well as its own cemeteries in many towns and villages in Romania. Connecting this development with this church’s attitude towards cremation, the overarching goal appears to be clear: attainment of a total monopoly upon the death and funeral industry in Romania. The annual profits of the Romanian funeral industry are 100 million Euros. Cremation is still legal in Romania and equal in status with the inhumation starting from the inter-war period.The Penal Code adopted by Carol II in 1936 was the most important moment in the regulation of cremation in Romania (Codul, 1937). More recently, the New Civil Code (2011) and the New Funerary Law (2014) strengthened the possibility of choosing cremation as a personal option in Romania. Under these legal conditions, we ask how the attitude of the Romanian Orthodox Church toward cremation may be explained, while the Roman Catholic Church (as a consequence of the Council of Vatican II, 1963) and other European Orthodox Churches (Serbia, Ukraine, and Russia) have a more permissive attitude toward cremation. The Romanian Orthodox Church has an attitude of rejecting cremation, similar to the Orthodox Churches of Greece and Cyprus. We underline the fact that the Roman Catholic Church accepts cremation with some restrictions. They refuse the religious service when the cremation is a result of atheism and they forbid spreading the ash. In fact, a lack of unity in the attitude upon cremation is manifested not just to the level of the European Christian Churches, but a continental level (Colombo, 2017: pp. 22–33). The specificity of each country determines a lack of unity upon this. There are three modern crematoria functioning in Romania. Two of these crematoria are private (Oradea, Bădeni/Turda, opened in 2012 and 2014) and one belongs to the local authorities (Vitan Bârzeşti crematorium in Bucharest, opened in 1994). These crematoria offer services for a population of approximately 19 million inhabitants. The number of cremations in Romania remained low in spite of the slight economic growth and the opening of new crematoria. Romania is in the last part of a European ranking of cremation. Serbia supplies a relevant comparison because both states have a majoritarian Orthodox population (Tables 6.3 and 6.4).

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Marius Rotar Table 6.3 The statistics of cremation in Romania and Serbia in 2015 (International, 2016: p. 26),

Serbia Romania

Crematoria

Cremations

Total deaths

% of deaths

2 3

3,405   972 (only for Vitan Bârzeşti and Ignis crematoria)

16,618 261,822

20.49 0.37

Table 6.4 Cremation in some European and non-European countries (2015) (International, 2016: pp. 18–30). Country

Crematoria

% of deaths

Japan Switzerland Slovenia Sweden Denmark South Korea Czech Republic United Kingdom Australia Canada Germany United States France Romania

1,495 28 2 58 20 57 27 277 80 unknown 164 2,867 177 3

99.97 88.44 83.65 81.53 80.90 80.79 80.45 76.32 69.23 (2009) 68.85 55.32 48.60 35.44  0.37 (only for Vitan Bârzeşti and Ignis crematoria)

4  Romanian Orthodox Church and the issue of cremation The anti-cremation rhetoric of the Romanian Orthodox Church used during the Sergiu Nicolaescu case was not original.These ideas have a long history reaching back to the opening of the Cenuşa Crematorium during the inter-war period. However, as acknowledged by some of the Romanian Orthodox Church representatives since the interwar period, there is no dogmatic or canonical argument to reject cremation (Popescu-Mălăieşti, 1931). Therefore, the most important and most frequently argued reason for rejecting cremation in the Orthodox view is that of tradition based on the burial of Christ. In addition to this, there are others drawn from the church’s own interpretation of Christian teachings such as the idea of the body as the shelter of the soul (the soul being a small part of the Holy Spirit). Additionally, the body-soul unity requires that the Orthodox Christian show respect for the body through inhumation instead of incineration. The question of resurrection would also be affected if Christians chose cremation. This situation is not representative just for Orthodox Christians. Other Christian denominations such as Roman Catholicism (Prothero, 2001) expressed fears that cremation would affect the cult of relics and also the resurrection of the dead. But in the second half of the twentieth century this situation changed. The Catholic Church allowed for cremation in the Second Vatican Council, though it still prefers burial. In either case, the Catholic Church requires the funeral mass as the main condition for both. As Peter C. Jupp (2006: p. 165) emphasizes, ‘this 64

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whole effect was the easing of the ban, not outright acceptance of, cremation.’ Also, in spite of these changes at the beginning of the twentieth century very little has been done to develop a Christian theology of cremation (Davies, 2002). The teachings of the Romanian Orthodox Church have strong connections between the living and the dead. This connection is why, after death, the bereaved organize a series of repeating memorial services for the deceased at regular intervals (three days, nine days, forty days, three months, six months, nine months, one year and seven years; Drăgoi, 2002). Such a connection leads to a particular perception of the corpse in relation to burial in Orthodox Christianity. Along with these elements, the particular significance of graveyards for Romanian spirituality is also invoked. The Romanian Orthodox Church further argues that incineration is a foreign practice for Romania, though this point has undergone some changes. The strongest argument here is that of calling cremation a pagan practice. However, this ignores the fact that many Christian beliefs accept cremation (including the Roman Catholic Church, for example), which makes this argument less valid. Also, the identification of cremation with freemasonry was a central argument against burning corpses assumed by Orthodoxy until the outbreak of the Second World War. After 1989, incineration was identified as being an atheistic and communist-inspired practice in Romanian Orthodox anti-cremationist discourse. The church often explained that the many civil funerals organized in the communist era resulted in incineration. Statistically, however, the number of cremations declined after the installation of communism in Romania, and civil funerals were preferred only by a small minority of Romanian communists. More recently, secularization, seen as a direct threat to Romanian Orthodoxy, is interpreted by the church as being the main process promoting cremation. Additionally, the cult of relics is very strong among Orthodox Christians in Romania. Thus, cremation as a practice would affect their entire system of representing death. The arguments in favor of this perspective are the following: if the saints were incinerated, there would have been no relics, as holy testimony of the Christian faith’s truth; the relics show us that every Christian is called to be, with body and soul, an evidence of the Holy Spirit (Gordon, 2013). For example, when Saint Andrew’s relics were brought to Bucharest in October 2011, more than 100,000 pilgrims came to worship them over five days, with 200 Orthodox priests serving continuously (Peste 100,000, 2011). Romanian law guarantees personal freedom, that is, the right of association and opinion. The Romanian Orthodox Church has its own interpretations of the idea of freedom. Prominent Romanian Orthodox theologian Bartolomeu Anania (as cited in Conovici, 2009) said in an article that theological freedom should be different from the moral, individual, or ontological freedom, being the ultimate type of freedom. Therefore, theological freedom would mean a type of relational freedom (which is gradually conquered through prayer and asceticism). Thus, according to Anania, absolute freedom is reached through unification with the Divine which is threatened by nothing and which does not exercise any threat. The relations between the Romanian state and the Romanian Orthodox Church are complex. Given that Orthodoxy is the main confession of Romanians, the Romanian state, secular by definition, exhibits ‘favorable’ neutrality towards this faith when compared to others. The Romanian Orthodox Church in turn has a reciprocal ‘friendly’ neutrality towards the state (Conovici, 2009). Thus, a series of repetitive and conciliatory discourses are strongly reiterated, especially during elections. However, in some cases after 1989 the state overruled the adversity of the Romanian Orthodox Church to some issues such as by accepting homosexuality and legalizing abortion (Stan and Turcescu, 2010). According to Orthodoxy, personal freedoms and rights are also located in sin. Under these conditions, there cannot be rights and freedoms that would be translated as a person’s right or 65

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freedom to sin (Conovici, 2009). This makes any kind of ‘freedom’ assumed at a personal or collective level, but indicating sin (such as homosexuality or, in this case, incineration) condemnable. Consequently, in the Orthodox view, the freedom of choosing incineration cannot be held by a Christian, and even if they request to be cremated after death, their family should refuse such a wish (Militaru, 2008). Thus, from the Romanian Orthodox point of view, refusing cremation reflects respect for the Word of God. It also explains why the Romanian Orthodox Church sometimes puts pressure on the families to disrespect the wishes of a person who chose cremation. Although cremation could be a solution to the issues of the Romanian funeral system, a large part of Romanian society accepts the church’s condemnation of cremation and preference for burial. This happens in the situation when the most important problem of the present funerary system in Romania is the crisis of resting places in the urban environment, which, theoretically, could be resolved through the development of cremation. It is also remarkable that 84% of the incinerated people during the inter-war period were Romanian Orthodox people, according to the Flacăra Sacră magazine. At the same time, 75% of the cases between 1928 and 1934 had a religious service, in spite of the interdictions of the Orthodox Church, according to the same magazine (Tablou, 1934; Tabloul, 1935). The cremationist movement in Romania tried continuously to prove that there is no conflict between the practice of cremation and the Christian religion. The Flacară Sacră magazine (1934–1941) published numerous articles on this theme (see, for instance, Cuvânt, 1934: pp. 1, 2). The Orthodox archimandrite Calinic I. Popp Şerboianu (1873–1941) also made efforts in this direction. He published in Flacăra Sacră a series of related articles (Şerboianu, 1935a; 1935b; 1935c; 1935d; 1936a; 1936b). Şerboianu initially rejected the idea of cremation but later became one of its supporters and a member of the Cenuşa Society. He justifies his change of mind through the fact he was initially badly informed on cremations. The church defrocked him for his adherence to the Catholic mentalities and his public support for cremation. Şerboianu invoked Biblical texts in defense of his ideas and also various liturgical practices of the Romanian Orthodox Church. He shows that in the Orthodox liturgical practice a desecrated Eucharist must be burned by the priest and its ash must be scattered in a stream. If the communion represents the body and the blood of Christ, the logic of rejecting the incineration appears unfounded to Şerboianu. Numerous critical opinions against the Romanian Orthodox Church and its inconsequence related to cremation were expressed in the magazine Flacăra Sacră and also by Şerboianu. He served as an Orthodox priest to the Cenuşa Crematorium from 1933 until 1940. Stronger reactions against him emerged in the orthodox journals of that time. He was called a ‘a poor unfortunate servant of Satan’ (Pe doua, 1934). He died in 1941 and was buried in Bellu Cemetery in Bucharest; his remains were exhumed and burned to the Crematorium Cenuşa in 1948. The Cenuşa Society tried to prove its good intentions toward the Romanian Orthodox Church at many points throughout its history. The society changed its initial name Nirvana to Cenuşa in response to the church’s accusation that they promoted a pagan and masonic practice in Romania. Society Cenuşa invited an Orthodox priest to bless the building in a public ceremony on July 8, 1925. The priest refused, though his private opinion was not against the cremation (M. L., 1925: p. 2). Another moment was the first incineration. The Society did not make the identity of the first incinerated person public in order to avoid tensions with the church (Profira Fieraru, 40 years old, housewife). Such efforts did not prevent protest. A group of Orthodox believers led by the priest Marin C. Ionescu tried unsuccessfully to protest (Rotar, 2011: pp. 160–181). The opening of the crematorium prompted ample actions from the Romanian Orthodox Church against the practice. The church launched a press campaign in the 66

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central newspapers and also in dedicated magazines (Biserica Ortodoxă Română, Glasul Monahilor, Cuvânt Bun, and Apostolul). The campaign led to a condemnation of the practice by the Synods of the Romanian Orthodox Church through the decisions adopted in 1928 and 1933. Religious services were forbidden for those choosing incineration, a practice reconfirmed by the 2012 Synod. The opinion of the Romanian Orthodox Church at that time was that cremation is a barbarian, anti-Orthodox, anti-Christian masonic practice, attacking the national being of the Romanian people, and an adaptation of Western models in Romania. Orthodox priests condemned it along with the broadcasting of religious services, abortion, alcoholism, using the western calendar, and holding political meetings during religious services. Among the Orthodox theologians expressing this point of view were the Iuliu Scriban (1928a: p. 2; 1928b: p. 1), Marin C. Ionescu (1928a: p. 1), Ioan Mihălcescu (1925: pp. 22–29; 1933: pp. 1, 2), Ion Popescu Mălăieşti, Haralambie Rovenţa (1934a: pp. 1, 2; 1934b: p. 1), etc. Some exaggerated opinions also appeared, presenting the crematorium as Satan’s oven (Haralambie Rovenţa). Representatives of the Romanian Orthodox Church vehemently criticized the City Hall of Bucharest for its support of the crematorium. The rhetorical formulas were present, as illustrated by the Orthodox priest Marin C. Ionescu and others: Romanian brothers and good Christians! We must rise united and write well in the registry of memories this Crematorium’s paganism and wickedness, in order to know in the future who we choose as mayors of the capital. Let us guard against liars and greedy and to choose godly people as worthy parents for the capital. Let us no longer to choose with our eyes closed like other times! Ionescu, 1928a: p. 4 The dead do not forgive, but they revenge for their pagan cindering and therefore we would consider ourselves all the more guilty of assisting indifferently to the functioning of a Crematorium, which would not have other higher purpose than the economic prosperity of a society whose members are thirsty for blood gains. Ionescu, 1928b: p. 1 Let us get out of uncertainty! Let’s struggle with the paganism that revives in our country and requires its idolatrous rights more brutally still un-prescribed by the ages that have elapsed since its decapitation! Shoulder to shoulder, Romanians! Keep up your courage, Christian brethren! Guinea, 1928: p. 4 To a practical level, fighting against the social cremations, the Romanian Orthodox Church established in 1928, through the magazine Cuvânt Bun, the fund ‘Ţarina Olarului.’ The Orthodox Church called upon Christians to donate money in the Ţarina Olarului fund in order to save unclaimed bodies from cremation: ‘Remember the wretched who die in hospitals and on the roads, unknown and unclaimed by anyone. Save them from the crematorium by your contribution’ (Activitatea, 1929: p. 3; Ştiri, 1928: p. 46). The Romanian Orthodox Church tried to close the Cenuşa Crematorium at every opportunity. In anticipation of coming political changes, the Synod solicited to the head of the State marshal Ion Antonescu in 1940 to close the Cenuşa Crematorium, calling it an institution ‘against the Church’ (Şedinţa, 1996: p. 143). The marshal refused. Orthodox theologian Dumitru Stăniloaie wrote an article against cremation in regards to this attempt. His article further reflected concern over the recent cremation of the former minister Grigore Trancu Iaşi in 1940. The Romanian 67

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Patriarchy brought this article back to the attention of the Romanian public opinion in 2013 with the occasion of the Sergiu Nicolaescu case.The Patriarchy made use of Stăniloaie’s remarks in the form of an official statement (excluding his praises of the dictatorship of Carol II) (Stăniloae, 1940: pp. 1–3). Confronted with this situation, Amurg, the Romanian Cremation Association informed the International Cremation Federation, who required that the Romanian authorities respect the legal right to incineration.The position of the Federation went public in Romania (Roman, 2013). The communist takeover in Romania led to a regress of cremation. The Cenuşa Society was dissolved and the crematorium became the property of the City Hall of Bucharest. In spite of the officially atheist character of the communist regime, preaching inclusively the ideology of the typology of the new man, the number of incinerations decreased compared with those from the inter-war period and no new crematories appeared. Cremation rates only grew in the seventh decade of the twentieth century as a result of the population growth in Bucharest and not due to any political or communist ideology. Thus the maximum number of cremations in the communist period was not reached until 1987, when 1,836 incinerations took place (Rotar, 2011: p. 362).The activity of the Cenuşa Crematorium continued after 1989 (a number of over 1,000 incinerations per year).Their work continued alongside the new crematorium in Bucharest after its opening in 1994 (Vitan Bârzeşti Crematorium). Pollution was the main argument for closing the Cenuşa Crematorium in 2002, although mass media invoked other reasons, too (e.g. the interest of the managers of the Vitan Bârzesti Crematorium to have a monopoly on cremation in Bucharest). Presently, the Cenuşa Crematorium functions through its cineraria. The building, however, suffers from an advanced state of degradation. It requires significant restoration.The most adequate solution would be its transformation into a funerary museum or a museum of cremation in Romania, similar to what is found in the USA, Netherlands, Spain, Hungary, and Austria. The Romanian Orthodox Church rarely expressed opinions on cremation during the communist regime (Prelipceanu, 1962; 1967). The fact that the communist authorities did not encourage the practice of cremation in a direct manner is an explanation for this situation. Not all priests respected the decisions of the 1928, 1933, and 2012 Synods. The cases when the priests performed religious services for cremations and were later defrocked are rare. According to Amurg, the Romanian Cremation Association, over 200 cases of priests disobeying the Synods occurred between 1990 and 2016 (Inconsecvenţa, 2015). Some of them were notorious, such as the case of Zoe Ceauşescu, the daughter of Nicolae Ceauşescu. After her death, an Orthodox priest performed a service where her body was held in the Church Elefterie cel Mic of Bucharest. The press announced the event (Corlăţan, 2009). The Vitan Bârzeşti crematorium then carried out the cremation. The priest that officiated the religious service for her funeral faced no consequences. Similar situations may be identified after the case of Sergiu Nicolaescu. Other Christian denominations or religions in Romania expressed similarly critical opinions on cremation. This is the case of the Greek-Catholic Church and of the mosaic cult (Taubes, 1928; Suciu, 1928; Brânzeu, 1937). More recently, the change of attitude of the Roman Catholic Church toward cremation produced significant changes for the Romanian Greek-Catholics. The Sergiu Nicolaescu case gave birth to a polemic between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church connected to the fact that the forty-days memorial service took place at Sfântul Iosif, the Catholic Cathedral in Bucharest. The Romanian Orthodox Patriarchy issued an official statement showing that they ‘remain faithful to the tradition of rejecting the practice of incineration.’ They accused the Roman Catholic Church of conceding to contemporary secularism by accepting the practice. Moreover, it is mentioned that the memorial service was initiated by the Catholic believers and not by the Orthodox believers, an affirmation without the possibility of being verified (Conflict, 2014). Finally, the Romanian Orthodox Church is 68

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more permissive of performing religious services for suicides than for cremations. Thus, under the pretext of madness, the majority of the Romanian suicides are granted the funeral religious service, approved by the Orthodox superior forums.

5 Conclusions The attitude of the Romanian Orthodox Church toward cremation influenced the development of this practice of body disposal in Romania. While this influence was constant on the population, we may not say the same thing about the manifestations and the influences on the laic power. In the last case, the effects were only limited and determined by the higher or lower degree of proximity of the political power of the Romanian Orthodox Church. The degree of secularism in Romania is different from the rest of Europe as a result of the importance and influence of the Romanian Orthodox Church. This religious disposition significantly shapes popular opinion concerning death and cremation. Moreover, Romanian society lacks a clear separation between personal beliefs and public expressions of religion. By confronting the societal modernization and secularization, the church tries to impose its preeminence upon public discourse. Thus while the debate over cremation has mostly disappeared from Western Europe, it continues to exist in Romania with very real implications for the funeral industry. Could it be possible for the Romanian Orthodox Church to change its attitude toward incineration in the near future? The most optimistic scenario would result in the opening of new crematoria in Romanian towns and an increase in the number of cremations (an estimated 10% of the deceased). Still, it is hard to imagine this in the near future due to the influence of the Romanian Orthodox Church on popular opinion. The Romanian Orthodox Church is taking more and more the role of the keeper of the national identity and traditions, creating difficulties for the process which I analyzed here. Key words: cremation, Romania, Romanian Orthodox Church, crematoria, Cenuşa Society

Note 1 Some information from this chapter was taken from my previous works (Rotar, 2011; 2013; 2015).

Further reading Conovici, I. (2009) Ortodoxia în România post comunistă. Reconstrucţia unei identităţi publice, I. Sibiu: Eikon. A large outlook on the Romanian Orthodox Church during postcommunist Romania. Many issues are analyzed taking into account the collapse of the communist regime in Romania in 1989. Colombo, A. (2017) ‘Why Europe Has Never Been United (Not Even in the Afterworld): The Fall and Rise of Cremation in Cities (1876–1939),’ Death Studies, 41(1), pp. 22–33. This paper is very useful in order to understand the difference between European countries in the implementation and development of cremation (nineteenth to twentieth centuries). Davies, D. and Mates, L. (eds). (2005) Encyclopedia of Cremation. Aldershot: Ashgate. A complete guide of cremation as universal practice around the world. Rotar, M. (2013) History of Modern Cremation in Romania. Newcastle Upon Tyne: CSP. This book covers the history of cremation in Romania, beginning with the emergence of cremationist ideas in 1867 and taking the reader up to the present day. Walter, T. (2012) ‘Why Different Countries Manage Death Differently: A Comparative Analysis of Modern Urban Societies,’ The British Journal of Sociology, 63(1), pp. 123–145. This article tries to elucidate ‘the factors that can explain both similarities and differences in the management of death between different modern western nations.’

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The Romanian Orthodox Church and cremation Pe două (1934) ‘Pe două coloane slugile crematoriului,’ Glasul Monahilor, XII(428), p. 16. Peste 100000 (2011) Peste 100000 de pelerini s-au închinat la moaşte de Sfântul Dimitrie [online]. Available at: www.mediafax.ro/social/peste-100-000-de-pelerini-s-au-inchinat-la-moaste-de-sfantul-dimitrie8912793. [Accessed 2 November 2011]. Popescu-Mălăieşti, I. (1931) Ardem sau îngropăm morţii. Bucharest: România Mare. Popovici, M. (1940) ‘Privire retrospectivă- perspective de viitor 1939–1940,’ Flacăra Sacră, 1(7), p. 2 Prelipceanu,V. (1962) ‘Incinerarea morţilor şi teologia ortodoxă,’ Studii teologice, II(XIV), pp. 414–428. Prelipceanu, V. (1967) ‘În legătură cu problema incinerării,’ Biserica Ortodoxă Română, LXXXV(11–12), November–December, pp. 1189–1193. Prothero, S. (2001) Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Registru (2016) Registru de incinerări 2008–2016. Crematoriul Vitan Bârzeşti, Administraţia Crematoriilor şi Cimitirelor Umane, Bucureşti. Roman, T. (2013) ‘România ameninţată cu UE pentru că încalcă drepturile omului mort, după scandalul incinerării,’ Jurnalul Naţional [online], 19 January. Available at: http://jurnalul.ro/stiri/observator/ incinerare-nicolaescu-asociatia-cremationista-634317.html. [Accessed 19 September 2014]. Români (2015) Români celebri care au fost incinerate [online]. Available at: www.incinerareamurg.ro/romanicelebri-care-au-fost-incinerati. [Accessed 27 January 2017]. Rovenţa, H. (1934a) ‘Crematoriul sau cuptorul Satanei,’ Glasul Monahilor, XII(388), 28 January, pp. 1, 2. Rovenţa, H. (1934b) ‘Urăciunea Pustiirei. Crematoriul,’ Glasul Monahilor, 391(XII), 18 February, p. 1 Rotar, M. (2011) Eternitate prin Cenuşă. O istorie a crematoriilor şi incinerărilor umane în România secolelor XIXXXI, Iaşi: Institutul European. Rotar, M. (2013) History of Modern Cremation in Romania. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press. Rotar, M. (2015) ‘Attitudes Towards Cremation in Contemporary Romania,’ Mortality, 20(2), 145–162. Scriban, I. (1928a) ‘Cei pe care-i doare inima de civilizaţie,’ Glasul Monahilor, 5(114), p. 2 Scriban, I. (1928b) ‘Înfruntarea Cenuşarilor în România. Un cuvânt bine ales şi croit. Cenuşăria în judecata ziarelor. Alte păreri la ziare,’ Glasul Monahilor, 5(116), pp. 1, 2 Şedinţa (1996) ‘Şedinţa Consiliului de Cabinet. S-a hotărât desfiinţarea cimitirului evreiesc din str. Sevastopol, . . . . 1940, octombrie 8,’ in: Benjamin, L. (ed). Evreii din România între anii 1940–1944, vol II: Problema evreiască în stenogramele Consiliului de Miniştri. Bucureşti: Hasefer. Şerboianu, C. (1935a) ‘Cremaţiunea şi religia creştină. O privire generală asupra bisericii,’ Flacăra Sacră, 2(2), p. 3. Şerboianu, C. (1935b) ‘Cremaţiunea şi religia creştină. “Focul” după Sf. Scriptură (VIII),’ Flacăra Sacră, 2(12), pp. 2–4 Şerboianu, C. (1935c) ‘Cremaţiunea şi religia creştină,’ Flacăra Sacră, 2(4), pp. 2, 3. Şerboianu, C. (1935d) ‘Cremaţiunea şi religia creştină. Ţărână eşti şi în ţărână te vei întoarce,’ Flacăra Sacră, 2(7–8), pp. 2–4 Şerboianu, C. (1936a) ‘Cremaţiunea şi religia creştină.“Focul” după Sf. Scriptură (X),’ Flacăra Sacră, 3(3), p. 3. Şerboianu, C. (1936b) ‘Cremaţiunea şi religia creştină. “Tradiţia” (XVI),’ Flacăra Sacră, 3(10), pp. 4, 5. Sergiu (2013) Sergiu Nicolaescu nu va beneficia de slujbă de înmormântare [online]. Available at: www.media fax.ro/cultura-media/sergiu-nicolaescu-nu-va-beneficia-de-slujba-de-inmormantare-10426021. [Accessed 15 June 2015]. Stan, L. and Turcescu, L. (2010) Religie şi politică în România postcomunistă. Bucharest: Curtea Veche. Stăniloae, D. (1940) ‘Incinerarea,’ Telegraful Român, Sibiu, 88(3), pp. 1, 2. Ştiri (1928) Cuvântul Bun, 1(4), p. 2. Suciu,V. (1928) Teologie Dogmatică Specială, vol.II: Sacramentele în general, Sacramentele în special şi Eshatologia. Blaj: Tip. Seminarului Greco-Catolic. Tablou (1934) ‘Tablou de incinerările ce s-au efectuat la Crematoriul Soc. Cenuşa din Bucureşti, de la punerea lui în funcţiune, 7 February 1928 şi până la 30 Septembrie 1934 (extras din registru de incinerări),’ Flacăra Sacră, 1(1), p. 8. Tabloul (1935) ‘Tabloul de incinerări efectuate la Crematoriul Soc. Cenuşa în cursul anilor 1928–1934, repartizate pe religiuni,’ Flacăra Sacră, 3(2), p. 8. Taubes, S. (1928) ‘Înmormântarea şi cremaţiunea în lumina cuvântului lui Dumnezeu şi a istoriei,’ Foaia Diecezană, 43, pp. 26–32.

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7 REFRAMING SITES OF THE DEAD IN BRAZIL Renato Cymbalista and Aline Silva Santos

1 Introduction Brazil, with its huge territory and multiple cultures, is a permanent case study concerning death, dying, and disposal. On one hand its recent (and not so recent) history of death, dying, and disposal shows a national drive towards Western ways of death and dying: secularization, nonmonumental cemeteries, and more silent attitudes towards death and dying, following the general tendencies described by Ariès (1977). On the other hand an incredibly diverse society reveals itself – one that resists the general trend of radical segregation between the worlds of the dead and the living. This chapter addresses some of the examples that show that the history of death and disposal in Brazil is an ongoing process, coming from its largest city, São Paulo: the resistance of the total dematerialization of the dead around the city’s only crematorium, and the recent mobilization of sites of death for the articulation of new social movements and social demands.

2  A general and ongoing trend towards the West When the Portuguese arrived in the Americas in the sixteenth century, they met an incredibly varied cultural landscape, not thoroughly understood. The dominant native group was the Tupi-guarani, who dominated most of the coastal regions. The non-Tupi were known by the Tupi as ‘Tapuia,’ a designation adopted by the Portuguese. In fact, Tapuia was a non-descriptive category that could frame any of the hundreds of ethnic groups and languages existing in that half of South America besides the Tupi-Guarani. The relations between the living and the dead among the Tupi could not be more different than the Catholic European of the sixteenth century, involving ritual anthropophagy and permanent migrations searching for the terra-sem-mal, or ‘the land without evils,’ where the living would meet the deceased ancestors (Clastres, 1978; Cymbalista, 2011). The history of colonization of Portuguese America is also the history of the eviction and genocide of the native peoples. The expansion of the colonial frontier for the European was the collapse of the traditional order for the Indians. The process was not different from what happened in other colonized countries. What is specific to Brazil is the resilience of this process due to the size of the territory and obstacles posed by the rain forest: although the process goes on for centuries, even today there are some Indian groups with no systematic contact to the Western world, in the Western part of the Amazon, not yet 72

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reached by the modern infrastructure. Indigenous concepts and practices regarding the relationship between the living and the dead are therefore still existent in South America. Many features of the baroque funerary culture were established in Brasil. However, the colonial world itself was not an absolute translation of the European one. Since the first centuries, the Portuguese based their colonial occupation on slave labor that came from Africa, in a forced immigration that brought to America different ethnic groups and cultures that interacted with each other and with the dominant Catholic world, and their specific relations with ancestors and deities (Reis, 1991; Rodrigues, 2005).That being said, a similar secularization process to the one that occurred in Europe after the eighteenth century occurred in Brazil, with a slight delay. In the beginning of the nineteenth century an Imperial decree inaugurated the process officially, ordering every city to build cemeteries only in the urban periphery. At that moment, the major concern was sanitation, and the creation of peripheral cemeteries addressed the need for more hygienic conditions in the cities (Cymbalista, 2002). From the 1850s forward, a new concern became more dominant: secularization. Part of the Brazilian liberal elites started to see burials in the churches and their churchyards as remaining traces of a colonial and non-European heritage that had to be addressed if the country wanted to belong to the modern West. The alliance of the ‘sanitarians’ and the ‘secularists’ meant a real war against more traditional burial practices, and the political and economic power of the religious orders and confraternities. The attack on more traditional burial practices was also an attack on Afro-Brazilian and African culture and spirituality, which organized confraternities that cared about its members’ lives and afterlives. Brazil was the last country in the West to abolish slavehood (in 1888), and in the next year, a Republic was established, with one of its first statements the official transferring of the management of the dead from the religious realm to the secular realm. The transfer of the care of the dead from the religious to the secular was an imperfect and still unfinished process – as late as 1985 the elected President Tancredo Neves died just before assuming his position and was buried in the cemetery of the Church of São Francisco de Assis in São João del Rey (Marcelino, 2015). Nevertheless, Western secular burial was in fact implemented, and since the second half of the nineteenth century, all the largest Brazilian cities exhibit grand and beautiful cemeteries such as São João Batista in Rio and Consolação in São Paulo, where the most important families built their mausolea in much the same way as the Pere Lachaise or the Recoleta cemeteries. For some decades in the first half of twentieth century and the 1960s, the central traditional public cemeteries were a place of expression of prestige, family cohesion, cultural sophistication, and political and economic power. The Republican ideal of monumental cemeteries as spaces of representation was the predominant burial practice among the elites for some decades, but in the second half of the twentieth century it lost its appeal. After the second world war, new urban practices such as mechanization, suburbanization and a general anti-urban attitude rose among the high middle classes and elites. This has led to a general lack of prestige of public spaces, including public cemeteries, and the elites started to long for the garden cemeteries they saw in the Anglo-Saxon world. The Brazilian version of it was the private and gated garden cemeteries that flourished especially in the wealthiest city of Brazil, São Paulo. Another trend emerging in Brazil in the twentieth century was cremation, which we expand upon in the next part of this chapter. At the turn of the twentieth century, the funerary scene in São Paulo seemed to correspond with the observations of Philippe Ariès’ prophecy of total segregation between the dead and the living that he said characterizes modernist Western society: a decadence of the public and monumental cemetery, and an increasing predominance of the silent representation in the garden cemeteries, with growing rates of cremation. However, death landscape in the city – and in Brazil in general – does not behave that simply. The next sections will explore two recent 73

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examples showing that burial spaces resist total silence in São Paulo: a re-territorialization of the remains of cremated people in the city’s only Crematorium; and the occupation of sites of death and dying with recent political movements of minority populations.

3  The memory gardens at São Paulo crematorium The first crematorium in Brazil was the ‘São Paulo Public Crematorium,’ today named the Crematorium ‘Dr. Jayme Augusto Lopes.’ It was inaugurated in 1974, and the project was developed by Ivone Macedo Arantes. It consisted of an open parking lot, a three-story building for ceremonies, administrative offices, and an extensive garden. The architectural style followed the premises of Brazilian Brutalist Modernism with an open plant and using fair-faced concrete, in a linear monolithic composition that aimed to compose harmoniously with the natural topography. The building, as envisioned by the architect, comprised a highlighted entrance for a funeral procession, a belvedere that provides a panoramic city view, a reception hall, a Ceremony Hall, public toilets, and administrative and technical service areas.The technical service areas included cremation equipment such as crematorium ovens, and a refrigerated room for bodies, along with the cremulator. The chimney ovens rest in the belvedere. According to Arantes, the architectural concept planned to ban all religious references in the common areas. The architect argued that, after several studies, the best symbol for this place would be a kind of abstract reference to cosmic space (Junto ao, 1974). Therefore, in this project, we do not find signs related to Protestant or Catholic views of death, in contrast to what is traditionally observed in Brazilian Cemeteries. Yutaka Toyota, a plastic artist, produced three steel panels to bring this cosmic atmosphere to the building. In addition, the garden surrounding the building consists of nearly 36.30 acres. Arantes pointed out that the intent was to create a place in which to contemplate and stroll, surrounded by many trees, without symbols that would invoke thoughts of death (Junto ao, 1974). As the place does not have a columbarium, the extensive garden would also be utilized for the anonymous spreading of ashes. However, the architect was unsuccessful in the project management, due to her arrest related to political engagement against the Brazilian military dictatorship. As a result, the building was not entirely faithful to the architect’s original vision. The principal difference, in this regard, dwells in the entrance, which was moved in construction to the opposite side of the plant, thus obliterating the originally proposed use of the space for funeral processions. The architect also never finished the landscaping plan and the open spaces were never clearly defined. Over time, the management planted trees and shrubs on the grounds in a disorderly way, without following a plan. In 2005, part of the garden was appropriated by the city government to form a public ecological park, which today still remains as a neighbor of the crematorium, and is widely used by the general population (Santos, 2015). The primary services offered are farewell ceremonies and posterior cremation – the funeral service itself must take place in another location such as a funeral home. The traditional crematoria ceremony is a simulation of the burial moment. It occurs in the Ceremony Hall, located in the base floor, which is accessed by ground level. The Ceremony Hall is located in the center of the crematorium building and is a round room with two separate entrances: one for the mourners and one for the coffin. The ceremony lasts about 15 minutes: the coffin is centered in the room and the deceased’s relatives choose three music pieces that are played in tribute to the dead. Mourners can also speak some words or even bring musicians to play music, as long as they stick to the 15-minute allotted time slot. After this, the coffin is lowered into the basement with a hydraulic elevator, simulating a burial. The cremation service does not initiate immediately after the farewell. On the arrival of the corpse in the basement, the coffin with the body 74

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is placed in a refrigerator to await cremation. After ten days, the family returns to get the ashes. This ceremony has remained unchanged since the crematorium opening until present day (see Figures 7.1–7.3). In view of all that has been mentioned so far, one might suppose that the impetus for the first Brazilian crematorium was aligned with modern cremation in the West, which many scholars claim was related to a move from religious thinking to rational thought and the secularization of society (Prothero, 2001; Ariès, 1977; Urbain, 1978). However, cremation in Brazil was originally viewed with suspicion, and for a long time, the Sao Paolo Crematory was the only crematorium in Brazil: the second Brazilian crematorium just opened in 1995, in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Today, though, the practice of cremation has become more established and accepted in Brazil with more than forty crematoria in the country, most of them privately held. In spite of the increase in the acceptance of cremation, some rituals can be observed in the surrounding garden of São Paulo Crematorium that avoid the complete disappearance of the sites of grief. Mourners voluntarily create little gardens within the crematorium great garden to pay tribute to their loved ones and dispose of their ashes. These small gardens are found in land adjacent to the Crematory, in a land that is in fact a public park. The practice is forbidden, but somewhat tolerated by the crematorium administration. These little gardens have varied forms and materials. Stones, plastic, wood and concrete create boundaries and limits in different shapes. Inside the borders, the bereaved dispose the ashes, in urns or directly in the ground. They also plant gardens

Figure 7.1  Crematorium plan in its aperture (1970s; Aline Santos).

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Figure 7.2  Base floor of crematorium building (Aline Santos).

Figure 7.3  Crematorium plan in present day (Aline Santos).

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and leave ornaments, photos, handcraft items, belongings of the deceased. Some people plant new shrubs and trees, in order to mark the places or pay tribute to their loved ones. Furthermore, we have encountered many religious signs, mainly Roman Catholic, the predominant religion in Brazil. Therefore, although the origins of cremation are linked to the secularization and to what Ariès describes as the silencing of the dead, in fact, people resist the total de-materialization of the cult of dead. Some of the memorial gardens are individual, while others are collective. Messages left at plaques demand respect from visitors, asking them not to drop ashes in existing gardens in order not to mix the remains, and inviting visitors to collectively care for the gardens.The park is filled not only with mourners, but also visitors who come to the park to ride their bikes or picnic with friends. The neighboring park has strict rules and constant policing, but the crematorium has less rules regarding its use. The adjacent Park prohibits the flying of kites and playing with dogs, so many people use the open spaces of the crematorium to conduct these activities. These actions happen mostly in the lawn. As a consequence, the bereaved prefer to build their little memorial gardens in the arborized areas, which are quieter and seem to get less foot traffic. In many cases, the memorial gardens show the deceased’s biography with elements that reveal both their beliefs and interests (see Figures 7.4–7.6).Thus, to some bereaved, the memorials have become a representation of the person who has died. The crematorium administration officially prohibits the memorial gardens, but in spite of this prohibition, mourners continue to build them. Sometimes, the staff destroy the gardens, although in a selective way, while other memorials are maintained. Ironically, the larger gardens are less prone to be destroyed. Some people informally ask the crematorium gardeners to care specially for their gardens, and most likely pay them for it. Many bereaved friends and family consider these memorials a peaceful resting place in nature, in contrast to lying in the more traditional oppressive concrete graves.

Figure 7.4  Memory garden examples (Aline Santos).

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Figure 7.5  Memory garden examples (Aline Santos).

Figure 7.6  Memory garden examples (Aline Santos).

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Many memorial garden-tenders that were interviewed stated that the memorials serve as one way to remember, and not lose, their loved ones. The families and friends of the dead utilize a variety of different resources to mark the site of ash disposal in order to find the gardens: planting specific and easily identifiable vegetation, and marking the branch of the trees and customizing them. Furthermore, since some of them have been periodically destroyed, using less portable and more permanent elements – like trees and large shrubs – provide a way of rebuilding the memory gardens in the same position if they are destroyed again by the crematorium staff.Visits are regular, and on commemorative dates, such as on Mother’s Day, the gardens are filled with new tributes celebrating the dead and the holiday. Brazilian memory gardens are different from those in the United States or the jardins du souvenir (Bayard, 1996; Boucher, 2011) in France. Unlike the indifferent lawns for the disposal of ashes and the payment of tributes, the gardens in São Paulo are individualized and well-marked. They are highly personalized and show a desire by the bereaved to remember and mark the location of the ashes. For being a spontaneous and unofficial practice, there is an intrinsic fragility found in them, particularly since many of them are periodically destroyed. Some bereaved insist in their reconstruction, while others will eventually give up rebuilding the memorials. In 2016, the management of the crematorium made a drastic decision and destroyed all the gardens of memory because of a reform in the gas incinerators of the facility. Consequences of this mass memorial destruction are still being studied. Visits to the field, however, already reveal a subtle return in the reconstruction of the memory gardens. The ash gardens of São Paulo’s Crematory point out that the history of death and dying in Brazil is on the move – that negotiations surrounding history and traditional customs matter a lot among its middle classes, and that the modernization of burial practices is a complex process. In the next section, this text investigates another dimension of contemporary relationships among the living and the dead, that present us with the negotiation between ancient customs and more ultra-modern elements. Some dead people of special meaning for minority groups receive specific attention in what concerns memory and identity.

4  Occupying political sites of death Places of death and dying are special. Depending on belief, they are considered places where penalized souls appear, places of communication between the world of the living and the dead, or places of reflection or learning. They can also be mobilized as places of political action, and this section of the chapter deals with three places that fit into the latter category, all of them located in the city of São Paulo. Two of them were the scenes of the murder of people in emblematic situations of violence, Edson Néris and Flávio Sant’Ana. The third is a burial place of an important transvestite of the history of São Paulo, Andréa de Mayo. The three places went through memorialization processes after politically significant deaths, and are unique because all three deaths function today not only as memorials, but have also helped to assert the rights of traditionally oppressed groups in contemporary Brazil: blacks, gays, transvestites, and transsexuals (Cymbalista, 2017).

Case 1: Edson Néris On February 6, 2000, dog trainer Edson Néris da Silva strolled hand in hand with his boyfriend Dario Pereira Netto in Praça da República in São Paulo. A group of around twenty skinheads named Carecas do ABC, already involved in episodes of violence, were roaming the area. They surrounded the couple in both the front and back and began to lynch them. Dario managed to 79

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escape after taking a kick in the back and a slap in the face, but Edson died in the attack. After the assassination, the executioners gathered in a bar at Bixiga to celebrate the monstrosity. But a street vendor who had witnessed the scene followed the killers to the bar and called the police. Sixteen men and two women were arrested for the act and taken to the nearest Police District for the killing of Néris. The murder of Néris aroused reactions in two ways – legally and socially. In the legal field, the prosecution fell into the hands of public prosecutor Marcelo Milani, who treated it for the first time in Brazilian Law as a ‘hate crime,’ a crime defined as one that denies the other’s right to exist. It was the first time that such a crime was typified in Brazil. The other legal alternative was to consider it a lynching, a milder crime because it would not individualize responsibilities. In February 2001, two of the killers were sentenced to twenty-one years in prison. Parallel to the legal consequences, the crime has also had an impact on the LGBT movement, and created social impetus for change. The turn of the century was a moment of increasing visibility of LGBT groups in São Paulo. In 2000 it was already announced that the city’s LGBT pride parade would become enormous, eventually becoming the largest in the world. Brazil itself was becoming more LGBT-friendly: groups of activists multiplied, specialized columns appeared in the mainstream media, the Mix Brasil Festival of sexual diversity matured, gay-friendly business started to advertise, and the AIDS epidemic moved to a less terrifying stage with anti-HIV cocktail treatments offered by the country’s public health system. Thus, the public visibility of sexual diversity was rapidly expanding. It was, therefore, an ideal moment for constructing a memorial and claiming a presence in public space. Therefore, the narrative of the murder of Edson Néris did not disappear like so many others who died for the same reasons. LGBT activist Ricardo Aguieiras had the idea of building a monument to commemorate the site. There were still no social networks at the time, and he used the comments section of the site Mix Brasil, one of the first LGBT website portals, to convey the idea. The idea received immediate, though somewhat fleeting, approval: ‘I remember that a lot of people approved the idea, but few came to me later.’ The most important support came from Luiz Mott, from Grupo Gay da Bahia, the organization that at the time led the work of reporting crimes committed against the LGBT population in Brazil, which offered a gift of a pink marble mined in Bahia for the construction. The idea was a monument in the shape of a pink inverted pyramid, referring to the inverted Pink Triangle that symbolized gay struggle and reframing the Nazi sign used in the concentration camps. ‘The inscription would refer to Edson Néris and homophobia, crimes and the fight against prejudice in Brazil. But the final text was never made.’ Edith Modesto, an activist working with LGBT adolescents and their families, suggested conducting a competition across colleges for the design of the monument. Aguieiras looked to pitch this to the city councilmen, but was not received. There was a lack of support also from the LGBT movement, itself. According to Aguieiras, this was due to him being an independent and non-partisan activist. The monument was not built, but the memory of the Edson Néris murder remained. At the First National LGBT Conference in June 2008 the episode of his death was one of the few remembered by the National Secretary for Human Rights. In 2010, the Carioca historian Marcio Retamero denounced the non-existence of the monument as an indicator of the precariousness of the realization of LGBT rights in Brazil (França, 2008): Edson Néris did not win any sites in his honor (I searched without success in Google); No memorial . . . was erected; No film, not even a documentary . . . Why don’t we still have a memorial to Edson as reported to the four winds at the first LGBT National Conference? The pink marble was already guaranteed by the Gay Group of Bahia, home state of the Edson family. Why has not it been built yet? Why did not any 80

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filmmaker take an interest in the case to make at least one documentary? Why has the City Council of SP or the SP City Hall or the State Government of São Paulo done nothing to this day in honor of Edson? Not even Law 10.948 / 01, which deals with the penalty for homophobic acts in the state of São Paulo, bears the name of the murdered victim in the most emblematic case of hate crime practiced in this state! Even so, the site exercised its power. In 2012, in a further achievement in the fight for the legitimacy of LGBT movements, the State Government of São Paulo inaugurated the Museum of Diversity, the first of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere. As a venue for its first headquarters, the State Government offered the Museum a choice of places from among the shops and available spaces in Metro stations across the city. Museum technicians chose a space in the Metrô República, and the criterion for their choice was precisely because of the history of the place, below where the murder of Néris occurred. Thus, the Museum of Diversity, besides being a place of activism, resistance, and celebration, also serves as a place of memory.

Case 2: Flávio Sant’Ana On February 3, 2004, shopowner Antonio Alves dos Anjos informed the police that he had been robbed. Police officers then conducted rounds with him in Santana, in the North Zone of São Paulo, catching and accusing Flávio Sant’Ana for the robbery. Sant’Ana was killed by the police with two shots. Upon seeing the body of Sant’Ana, Antonio realized that he was not the thief. Flávio was black and young. After the murder, the cops forged a crime scene, putting Antonio’s wallet in Flavio’s pocket, as well as a scraped-numbered weapon. Antonio reported that he was threatened by the police so he would not change the version that Sant’Ana was the assailant. The police claimed that he had been killed after a ‘rough move,’ implying that he had pulled a gun. The body was only found by the family after two days in the IML, without identification, meaning he would be buried as indigent. Forensic examination found no signs of firearm residue in his hands. The greater odds pointed to the disappearance of Flávio Sant’Ana’s murder in the midst of the grotesque numbers of police deaths of young black men in Brazil. But in this case, the exceptional happened. Flávio was middle class, was a recent graduate in dentistry, owned a car, and had a Swiss girlfriend who was well-travelled. But the decisive element was the fact that Flávio’s father was a retired military police officer and familiar with the forging of crime scenes. In addition, the family had artists and activists in their social network, who were socially active and engaged. The death of Flávio produced a strong organization of black rights activists who named themselves the ‘Frente 3 de fevereiro’ (February 3rd front) and whose goal was to ‘carry out the purpose of not letting this death fade.’ The Front set some political actions in place following the episode. Two months after the assassination, on April 4, the Front inaugurated a ‘horizontal monument’ in memory of Flávio, with the presence of his family. The idea of the horizontal monument – or anti-monument, or counter-monument – is an instrument of politicization of the space that has been mobilized by several social groups in the last decades. Flat and floor-level, it contrasts with the vertical monument, the many traditional marks, statues, memorials, mausoleums that seek to crystallize, in a constructed form, a narrative in the space of the city. The horizontal monument marks the ground, and is dependent on engagement, not contemplation. The monument consisted of an iron plaque reproducing a stylized sketch in realistic size. Within the figure of the body the phrase: ‘Here! Flávio F. Sant’Ana was killed by the Military Police of São Paulo.’ The day after the act, the PM destroyed and removed the monument. After 81

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a week, the Front returned to the same place and restored the monument, this time in concrete and paint, cast in asphalt in order to prevent its removal. Again the next day, the monument was semi-destroyed. After a year of Flávio’s death a demonstration was held on the spot.The Frente 3 de Fevereiro has acted on other levels: it has publicized, published, and sang and danced the story. It has also acted in political and legal ways, seeking to punish those responsible in an emblematic way. It was revealed that some of the implicated police officers had already participated in other, similar, crimes. It is not possible to know what would have happened had the occurrence at Frente 3 de Fevereiro not been associated in public memory with the place of death and centered it as a symbolic center for its claims of violence against Afro-Brazilians, increasing the visibility of the incident in the media. But this death had a different outcome from most of the deaths of black young men in the country: the three policemen responsible for the murder were convicted in 2005 for up to seventeen years in prison. However, if justice was obtained, memory was not. After rebuilding the monument twice and seeing it destroyed, Frente 3 de Fevereiro was unable to continue forever with its action. There is currently no memorial landmark at the site.

Case 3: Andréa de Mayo Andréa de Mayo was controversial. Born in 1950 in São Paulo, the beginning of her career was the same as many other poor outsiders in the country: she left home before she was 18, washed cars, shined shoes, and swept sidewalks. In her early 20s Andréa came out as gay, and then as a transvestite. It was then that her career started to stand out. She owned celebrated nightclubs – Val Improviso and Prohibidu’s – and she started buying apartments filled with bunk beds to rent for other transvestites, in addition to helping AIDS patients. She was no saint, and walked around with a munchaku, the double stick of martial arts. At the same time, her position as a nightclub owner gave her access to mainstream São Paulo society. She was one of the first public voices of Trans-people in Brazil. She was the first to explain São Paulo’s Trans world on television in 1985, and was often invited to participate in public debates and discussions. In May 2000, Andréa underwent a surgery in order to remove industrial silicone from her thighs. Unlike prostheses, the industrial silicone – much cheaper – is utilized in clandestine clinics, sometimes by the transvestites themselves. It also causes higher risks and complications. Andréa did not survive surgery and died at age 50 on May 16. Her relationship with her biological family was terrible, and she was buried in the tomb of Father Walter de Logun Edé, who was her ‘Pai-de-Santo,’ or godfather in the Candomble AfroBrazilian cult, in the prestigious public cemetery of Consolação, the oldest and most traditional in the city. In 2000, transvestites and transsexuals did not have the right to use their preferred chosen name, and Andréa was buried under her baptism name, Ernani dos Santos Moreira Filho. In the first years following her death, the grave was visited by acquaintances, but soon it was forgotten. In 2015 the Municipal Funerary Service signed an agrément with PUC-SP, the Catholic University, in order to map and publicize the vast memory and heritage resources of the Cemetery of Consolação. In a meeting in March 2016 the Coordinator Lucia Salles was informed of Andréa’s forgotten grave. She did research and located the grave. Then she contacted Father Valter de Ogun, proposing to remember Andréa’s memory through her grave. The idea was to ‘rename’ the grave with Andréa’s chosen social name, in an act of reparation by the state. The choice was for an austere plate, in black granite with inscriptions in gold. Since the plaque was to serve as a public reparation, the inscribed language would not be that of art, activism, or protest, but that of official politics, and would be official in appearance (no rainbow or glitter, therefore). 82

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The plate of 30 cm × 26 cm was carved by a stonecutter specializing in tombstones and was paid for (only $250) through a donation. The SFMSP established the following inscription: Andréa de Mayo Homage to a fight story And persistence in guaranteeing rights We celebrate diversity, memory and life Municipal Secretary of Services Funeral Service of the Municipality of São Paulo Spring 2016 The installation of the plaque was done in November 17, 2016, with a public performance of a drag queen theater group and several speeches from authorities, who recognized the Brazilian State’s historical guilt in violating the rights of Trans-people, and expressing a desire for change. Depending on one’s point of view, the attribution of the social name to Andréa de Mayo may seem only a simple homage and low cost, or a symbolic act of great proportions. For many, this was the first act of reparation of the right to memory for transsexuals and transvestites in Brazil, and maybe one of the first in the world. It was an important step made by public authorities to recognize these groups as subjects of rights, not just as vulnerable groups or users of specific public health programs.

5  Final remarks The gardens of the São Paulo Crematorium and the political occupation of sites of death and burial reveal that death and dying in Brazil have specific traits. On the one hand, the secularization and silencing of the dead have never happened in Brazil as described by Ariès in his general framework of the history of death in Europe. While death is mildly segregated from realms of the living and there is a trend towards a silencing of death in Brazilian society and its urban landscape, this chapter demonstrates how death, disposal, and grief in Brazil are also used to permanently create meanings related to the sites of death: mourning, politics, protest, and honor. Key words: Brazil, cremation, crematorium, LGBT death, death, São Paulo, São Paulo Crematorium, Andréa de Mayo, Edson Néris, Flávio Sant’Ana

Further reading Moser, R. H. (2008) The Carnivalesque Defunto: Death and the Dead in Modern Brazilian Literature. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Protheo, S. (2001) Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Reis, J. J. (2003) Death Is a Festival: Funeral Rites and Rebelion in Nineteenth Century Brazil. Chapel Hill, NC: North Carolina University Press. Verdery, K. (1983) The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press.

Bibliography Anais da I Conferência LGBT, Brasília, June 2008.Available at: www.sdh.gov.br/sobre/participacaoo-social/ cncd-lgbt/conferencias/anais-1a-conferencia-nacional-lgbt-2 Antenore, A. (2017) ‘Andréa’s Turn: About the Right to Die as a Transvestite’. Revista Piaui, 125, February, p. 74.

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Renato Cymbalista and Aline Silva Santos Ariès, P. (1977) História da Morte no Ocidente: Da Idade Média aos nossos dias. [Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present]. Translated by P.V. de Siqueira. Rio de Janeiro: Francisco Alves. Bayard, J. -P. (1996) Sentido oculto dos ritos mortuários: Morrer é morrer? [Hidden Sense of the Mortuary Rites: To Die is to Die?]. Translated by B. Lemos. São Paulo: Paulus. Boucher, C. (2011) ‘Le nouveau cimitière Beausoleil aux Sorinières [The New Cemetery Beausoleil at Sorinières], Lettre d’information du CAUE 44, 10. Available at: https://issuu.com/caue44/docs/ bulletinn10-web. Clastres, H. (1978) A terra sem mal: o profetismo tupi-guarani. São Paulo: Brasiliense. Cymbalista, R. (2002) Cidades dos vivos: arquitetura e atitudes perante a morte nos cemitérios do Estado de São Paulo. São Paulo: Anna Blume/FAPESP. Cymbalista, R. (2011) Sangue, ossos e terras: Os mortos e a ocupação do território luso-brasileiro. São Paulo: Alameda/FAPESP. Cymbalista, R. (2017) Mobilizando a memória em lugares difíceis. Revista do Centro de Formação e Pesquisa do SESC-SP França, C. E. (2008). O linchamento de Edson Néris da Silva: reelaborações identitárias dos skinheads carecas do Brasil na sociedade paulista contemporânea. Master’s Dissertation, Universidade Estadual Paulista, Faculdade de Filosofia e Ciências. Junto ao crematório, locais para o lazer (1974) Folha de São Paulo, 17 July, p. 11. Marcelino, D. A. (2015) O corpo da nova república: Funerais presidenciais, representaçãoo histórica e imaginário político. Rio de Janeiro: Edotira FGV. Prothero, S. (2001) Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Reis, J. J. (1991). A morte é uma festa: ritos fúnebres e revolta popular no Brasil do século XIX. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Rodrigues, C. (2005) Nas fronteiras do além: A secularização da morte no Rio de Janeiro, séculos XVIII-XIX. Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional. Santos, A. S. (2015) Morte e paisagem: Os jardins de memória do Crematório Municipal de São Paulo [Death and Landscape: The Memory Gardens of São Paulo Crematorium] Master’s Thesis, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil. Urbain, J. (1978). La Société de Conservation. Paris: Payot. Walter, T. (1996) ‘Ritualising Death in a Consumer Society’, RSA Journal, 144(5468), pp. 32–40.

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8 STAND BY ME The fear of solitary death and the need for social bonds in contemporary Japan Chikako Ozawa-de Silva

1 Introduction Throughout the history of human beings, people have engaged with the questions of what it means to die, what happens after death, and how we should lead our lives while we are alive. In recent years in Japan, however, this natural questioning of death has reached an unusual point: the fear of solitary death has become the equivalent to a social epidemic across various age groups. Even though the fear of death is common across all cultures and societies, this occurrence in Japan is not the fear of death itself per se, but the specific fear of dying alone. This fear has triggered increased anxiety among Japanese in recent years, both young and old. In this chapter I will draw out the connections among the collective fear of solitary death in Japan, the traditional norm in Japan that death is a family business (including how one receives medical care, how one dies, and how one is buried), and the recent transition from collectivist to individualist norms. It will become clear that this increasing fear of solitary death is the symptom of complex processes underway in contemporary Japan. Among all the possible questions people may have upon death, one question that may not arise so frequently among people in North American and European societies is who owns one’s death or to whom does one’s death belong. Even fields such as bioethics tend to neglect this fundamental question of whether death belongs to the individual, to the family of the individual, or to society. Although raising awareness about the rights of patients in medical care – such as through investigating issues like informed consent, living will, and euthanasia – is extremely valuable in protecting human rights and respecting the individual’s preferences in how to die, bioethics is founded upon highly individualistic notions that are dominant in the West. When operating under the premise of individualism, it makes sense why individuals should be honored in their choices of medical treatments including their terminal care. Many societies including Japan, however, have less individualistic and more collectivist and family-oriented norms. At the same time, Japanese society has been in a state of flux and has been heavily influenced by Western values and practices including individualist norms. Recent demographic changes have resulted in the decline of the traditional extended family, which is being replaced with nuclear and single-parent families. In 2015, single-member households accounted for more than onethird of the population (Nihon Keizai Shinbun, 2016).

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2  Solitary death (kodokushi) Solitary death has its own term in Japanese, kodokushi, and the way the media reports on it reveals how the fear of solitary death has reached the level of a social epidemic in recent years. As will be seen in this chapter, this anxiety manifests in various ways, including a new type of group suicide (internet group suicide), the intense media coverage of the increasing number of elderly individuals living alone, and the way such ‘socially isolated’ seniors die alone. This rising fear of solitary death correlates with the move from traditional collective and family-oriented norms that place the family in charge of the individual’s death to more individualist norms in which individuals cherish their freedom to maintain a distance from the family. In order to explain the traditional role of the family in the individual’s death and dying in Japan, I provide the examples of legal and medical practices revolving around the end of life issues that reveal how the family takes precedence over the dying individual that may appear peculiar to non-Japanese. In Japan, death has been traditionally a family business and it belongs to the family as much as, if not more than, to the individuals themselves. The fear of solitary death is partially a result from the contradicting wish to cherish the individual’s freedom in their choice of lifestyle and manner of death, on the one hand, and the wish to also indulge in the family’s support, on the other. In other words, in Japan’s traditionally collective social norms, death belongs to the family and individuals traditionally do not need to think, plan, or worry much about their death. Recent demographic changes and the transition to more individualistic values now place individuals in a rather ambiguous place where they would like to make their own decisions but also do not wish to, or cannot, take full responsibility for their death. The recent natural disaster, the Great East Earthquake in 2011, and the increasing number of solitary deaths among elderly individuals who live alone have raised questions regarding individualistic norms and have resulted in a renewed interest in kizuna, ‘bonds,’ especially with family. In the next section, I will draw on two cases that reflect people’s fear of solitary death and then describe practices that show how in Japan one’s death belongs to one’s family rather than to oneself.

3  Fear of solitary death among young Japanese: internet group suicide Traditionally, the norm in Japan has been that people live with their family and die surrounded by their children and grandchildren. The idea of dying alone is therefore an unappealing one in a society whose members tend to have a highly social and interdependent construal of selfhood. Given Japan’s aging population, it is perhaps not surprising that an increasing fear of solitary death occurs as people reach retirement age and beyond. Strangely, however, a fear of dying alone or ‘solitary death’ has not been limited to the elderly in Japanese society in recent years. Rather, young individuals exhibit a fear of dying alone as well. More surprisingly, this fear becomes particularly evident in suicidal youth. A new type of group suicide has been attracting young individuals who feel lonely and therefore wish to die with others. These others can be strangers with whom they have connected via suicide websites, because they are literally ‘too lonely to die alone’ (Con, 2006; Ozawa-de Silva, 2008; 2010; Shibui, 2007). One may wonder, what is the point of committing suicide with others? This new type of suicide, netto shinjyu, or internet group suicide, emerged in the early 2000s and reveals a distinctive kind of existential suffering and mental pain among young suicidal individuals. It was first reported in 2003 when several men and women were found dead in an empty apartment room. A high school girl was the first witness and the police inquired how she stumbled across the suicide. Eventually she shared that she had connected with the deceased 86

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men and women via a suicide website and had planned to conduct suicide together with them. She had second thoughts and could not bring herself to go to the arranged location on the agreed upon day, but visited the location later (Ozawa-de Silva, 2008; Shibui, 2007). After the incident, the media reported continuously on an increasing number of internet group suicides until suicide experts counseled against doing so out of concern for the Werther effect, or copycat suicides (Takahashi, 2001). The media were particularly intrigued by what appeared peculiar to many people. The individuals involved always followed the same method: carbon-monoxide poisoning from charcoal briquettes; there were almost always more than three people involved in the group suicide; and the wills that were left often indicated that they were too lonely to die alone and the people they died with could have been anyone, as long as they did not have to die alone. Within a culture that tends to tolerate if not morally valorize suicide (Kitanaka, 2011; Pinguet, 1993), it was noticeable how negative and critical the media and social commentaries were toward those who committed this new form of suicide. The individuals were seen as callous youth who treated death lightly, as if they did not even know what it meant to die (Ozawa-de Silva, 2008). Some psychiatrists even stated that these young people lacked the commitment to die or the resolve of suicide (kakugo no jisatu; Kagawa and Mori, 2004). When I closely followed numerous suicide websites over several years for my research, I noticed several distinctive patterns among the posted statements by suicide website visitors. Many stated things like, ‘It is not that I have a strong reason to die, but there is no good reason to keep on living,’ or ‘Somehow I feel like ending my life,’ or ‘I want to reset my life and start over’ (Ozawa-de Silva, 2008; 2010). Such statements may partially explain the harsh tone taken in the media and public commentary, but at the same time, not having a strong commitment to die does not mean these young individuals were not suffering mental pain. Research suggests that suicidal people are often torn between living and dying; that suicide is not typically a rational choice, but rather an attempt to escape from mental distress; and that there is typically a wish to keep living even up until death (Takahashi, 2001). This new type of suicide reveals an intense loneliness, a feeling of being unneeded by anyone, a sense of disconnectedness, an absence of meaning, and a strong wish to die with others (Ozawa-de Silva, 2008; 2010; Shibui, 2007). ‘I am too lonely to die alone,’ ‘Is there anyone who wish [sic] to die with me? Please contact me,’ and ‘It is too much to die alone after I have been feeling so lonely,’ are examples of common statements made by such individuals in their wills or in online posts on suicide websites. Even though young Japanese often live with their families, the traditional extended family where there was always someone at home is no longer a norm, especially in urban areas. In the past, it was common that the husband worked and the wife became a homemaker upon marriage or upon having children, but according to the national census, 45.4% of households in 2012 had two working parents (Sōmushō Tōkeikyoku, 2012). The average number of individuals per household was 2.42 according to the national census in 2010 and it has shown a continuous decline over the past few decades. Once young adults start college, many start living alone in a rented apartment, as the types of college dorms seen in the United States are rare in Japan.When I interviewed over thirty college students in Tokyo in 2010, many students, especially those who were living alone, informed me that they needed to constantly check their phones (e.g. e-mail messages, texts) to see what their friends were up to and felt anxious when left alone (Personal Communication, 2011). A fear of being left alone was one of the main concerns they voiced, and such anxiety is mirrored in popular culture. An episode of the Japanese animated show Mouso Dairinin (Paranoia Agent) by the director Kon Satoshi depicts such loneliness and fear of being left behind in an episode devoted to the topic of internet group suicide. 87

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4  Fear of solitary death among elderly and middle-age Japanese: solitary death in an indifferent society If the ever-shrinking size of the household with two working parents and less children impacts the pervasive sense of disconnectedness and loneliness among the youth in Japan, then the demographic changes that now put the ratio of the single-person households as the most dominant form of the household in Japan (Japan Census, 2011) may point to a connection with the increasing fear of solitary death among elderly individuals living alone. Kodoku-shi, or solitary death, has become a serious social concern among the elderly in recent years in Japan. The media have focused on solitary death as a serious social concern since the early 2000s (Kotsuji and Kobayashi, 2011: p. 121). Although solitary death itself was not a new issue, and had been recognized and sporadically reported on since the 1970s, it was not until right after the Hanshin Awaji earthquake in 1995 when researchers started taking the issue seriously. Elderly individuals who lost their local relationships and community networks due to the earthquake ended up dying alone without any family members to witness their death or arrange their funerals, raising legal and medical questions (Kotsuji and Kobayashi, 2011). Soon after solitary deaths among earthquake survivors had been reported, it was discovered that numerous elderly people died alone in urban apartment buildings, within small village communities, and other situations, regardless of whether they had been survivors of the earthquake (Aoyagi, 2008; Naritomi, 2009). From the early 2000s on, the issue of solitary death was widely reported on and reached widespread public awareness. Once public awareness was gained, then the term kodokushi started appearing everywhere (Fukukawa and Kawaguchi, 2011; Kotsuji and Kobayashi, 2011; Kudo, 2013). The concept resonated deeply among both the elderly and the non-elderly, reflecting and contributing to a collective fear. When Japan’s most recent major natural disaster struck, the Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami of 2011, it was met in Japan with an immediate concern for the potential of future solitary deaths among the victims and survivors of this natural disaster. In 2010 the major Japanese national public broadcasting corporation NHK (Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai) broadcast a special TV program entitled Muen-Shakai: Muen-Shi 32,000 no Shogeki (‘Indifferent Society: The Shock of 32,000 Solitary Deaths’). Muen-shakai, a term coined by the NHK, is typically translated as ‘indifferent society’ or ‘apathetic society,’ and implies a society in which individuals are isolated and have weak interpersonal personal connections. The notion of a ‘solitary death’ in the context of an ‘indifferent society’ left a significant impact not only on elderly but also people who were in their 30s and 40s (Kudo, 2013: p. 42), and the term muenshakai came into widespread use. People who had very limited interaction with others in their 30s and 40s began to self-identify as potential future cases of solitary death. Even though these people were still living with their parents, once their parents died they would most likely be on their own because of a lack of social networks and relationships with others (Fujimori, 2010). Even though NHK intentionally focused on this aspect of Japanese society where an increasing number of elderly people are found dead alone, once the term was coined it stirred social anxieties and came into popular usage (Kotsuji and Kobayashi, 2011). Numerous social and family structural changes have led to the increasing number of solitary deaths and the perception of an ‘indifferent society.’ In 1995, most Japanese families consisted of two parents and children (34.2%). The rising single-member household, however, was already the second dominant form (25.6%). The number of single-member households rose to 32.4% in 2010 and is expected to increase to 37.2% in 2035 (Kudo, 2013: p. 42). This rise in singlemember households occurred concurrently with the decline of nuclear family households, which dropped to 27.9% in 2010 (Japan Census, 2011). 88

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Since World War II, the average Japanese life span has grown significantly both for men and women. In 1947, the average life span for men was 50.6 and 53.96 for women. As of 2015, the average life span for men is 80.75 and 87 for women (Garbage News, 2017). This increase in lifespan has contributed to the number of elderly Japanese living and dying alone. According to a report by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, there were 1,000 cases of solitary death in 2000, 1,500 cases in 2007, and 2,500 cases in 2010 (Ministry of International Affairs and Communications, 2016). As of 2015, individuals who are above the age of 65 occupy 26.7% of the Japanese population. This figure is the highest in the world, followed by Italy (22.4%) and Germany (21.2%), while the United States is just under 15.0% (Ministry of International Affairs and Communications, 2016). The increasing number of single-member households among the elderly in this aging society has resulted in a large number of elderly who die and are not found for several months. The Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake in January 1995 resulted in 560 cases of solitary death in temporary housing. While such numbers may appear small considering the size of Japan’s population, such stories have an outsized impact in Japanese society, especially when popularized by media coverage. Along with concerns about solitary death, another related social issue is that of ‘parasite singles.’ The label ‘parasite singles’ refers to single adults (with or without jobs) who continue to live with their parents and remain financially dependent on their parents after graduating from school. Back in the 2000s, ‘parasite singles’ referred to those in their 20s, but such individuals are now reaching their 30s and 40s, and the term is still used to refer to them. There are concerns that aging parasite singles will be future candidates for solitary death (Nippon no Kaigo-gaku, 2014). This discussion thus reveals that the fear of solitary death manifests among the elderly and the young. The next section describes traditional Japanese cultural, but also medical and legal norms and practices that place the family in charge of the individual’s death and dying. The practices surrounding informed consent, treatment decisions, organ donations, and funeral rites show that death has primarily been a family business in Japanese culture. Thus the family owns the individual’s death and dying process in Japan.

5  To whom does death belong? End of life care, organ donation rights, and funeral rites in Japan Anthropologists have rich ethnographic accounts of how death and dying are comprehended differently in different cultures. These studies explore funeral rites and rituals surrounding death (e.g. Kleinman, 1988; Lock, 2001; Metcalf and Huntington, 1991). This research reveals that in many societies, death and how to die belong to the dying individuals’ family rather than to the individuals themselves. Although much anthropological literature on cross-cultural studies of death and dying tend to focus on various burial rituals, anthropologists like Kleinman (1988) and Long (2005) examine how death and dying are viewed differently in Taiwan and Japan. They both show through rich ethnographic observations of dying patients in these countries how the role of family plays a dominant part in dying patients’ medical treatments to the point that they question the whole premise of the ‘autonomy’ of patients. They implicitly indicate that, if anything, the family owns the patient’s death, an arrangement that is accepted by the patient. Japanese scholars argue that the notion of the autonomy of patients is based on Western individualistic norms and that such notions do not apply across cultures. In contrast, the family’s opinions are strongly reflected within clinical settings in Japan (Ino, 2006; Okinawa, 2004). The question concerning to whom death belongs is a thorny issue in contemporary Japan. If young Japanese are casually asked whether they think death belongs to them or not, they are 89

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likely to say that of course it belongs to them. But an examination of current medical and funeral practices reveals another picture. If one owns one’s life and death, then naturally it is logical that the individual should make decisions and receive all medical information, just as the notion of informed consent presents. Informed consent is a normalized moral view. In such a view, receiving end of life care according to one’s will and being able to die with dignity are within the rights of individuals. In Japan, however, when patients are suffering from terminal conditions such as advanced stage cancer, physicians commonly notify the family members first, and not the patients. Physicians frequently seek the familial consensus agreeing to inform the patient before doing so. Informed consent only began emerging in Japan in the 1990s. Japanese medical law was not revised to include the necessity of explanation and consent until 1997. Although informed consent has become more prevalent in recent Japanese medical practices, it is still common for physicians to provide terminal diagnoses and prognoses only to family members and not to patients. In March 2013, a patient’s daughter sued Tokushima University Hospital for informing her mother, who was in her 70s, about her prognosis of only having several months to live due to cancer (Tada, 2013).This case was widely reported, and the patient’s daughter claimed that her mother had been shocked by receiving her prognosis and became mentally unstable to the point of stopping her medication for her cancer treatment.The patient died within a year.The patient’s daughter blamed the hospital for shocking the patient by informing her of their prognosis without the family’s consent.This case reflects a situation where the physician followed the practice of informed consent, but violated a cultural expectation regarding appropriate medical practice. In the United States, informed consent exists only between a physician and a patient. The physician may not share any medical information with family members without a patient’s permission. In Japan, informed consent frequently includes the family of a patient. The familial ownership of death and dying is further illustrated in the legal terms of advanced directives and living wills. In the United States, advanced directives and living wills are legal documents. These documents provide a patient’s legally binding directions for end of life care and medical treatment. But in Japan, advanced directives and living wills are not legally binding and family members can overrule the will of the patient. The patient’s legal rights in relation to organ transplant and donation are highly debated. Traditionally, the decision to donate organs in Japan fell to the family rather than the individual. As Margaret Lock notes, ‘brain death,’ a rather new type of death in history, was quickly accepted and naturalized in North America (2001) but not in Japan. This conception of death impacts the perception of organ donation. In the United States, brain death is considered a moment of death. Family members lack the power to overrule an individual’s decision made prior to death concerning organ donation. In Japan, however, adults who are older than 15 years old can sign organ donor cards issued by the Japan Organ Transplant Network (JOT). This card serves merely to express the individual’s wish to donate their selected organs upon death. The family, however, retains the power to overrule this stated preference at the time of death. Naoko Manabe, a coordinator for the Tokyo-based Japan Organ Transplant Network, notes that ‘[i]t can be difficult to obtain consent from families.’ Manabe explains that Japan is primarily a Buddhist nation, so there is a sense among many people here that the body should not be divided after death. . . . Many families say they do not want their relative’s organs to be removed, even if they can be used for someone else. Ryall, 2016 In Japan, there is a strong desire to keep the body intact, even after death. There is a term, gotai manzoku, that literally translates as ‘five-body satisfaction,’ referring to the five ‘limbs’ of the 90

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head, arms, and legs, with no defects. Many parents wish for their babies to be born with this kind of ‘wholesome body.’ Even casual acts such as tattooing and piercing are often considered forms of violating one’s body, which may be perceived (particularly among older Japanese) as disrespectful to one’s parents who gave birth to oneself. Many note that gotai manzoku may be a significant reason why there are comparatively few organ donors in Japan (Ohnuki-Tierney, 1984; Lock, 2001). The Japanese funeral is another example of how death is a family, rather than individual matter. In recent years, an increasing number of individuals have begun to advocate for their freedom to choose the rites for their own funeral (Ino, 2006; Shimazono, 2009). Funerals in general, however, still reflect strongly the wish of the family members of the deceased, rather than the deceased’s own preferences. Although individuals may leave a will, their wishes are often treated merely as a preference and not as binding. One researcher, Ino, finds that Japanese respondents who were asked about funeral arrangements often said that ‘it is a family responsibility to conduct a proper funeral service’ (2006: p. 207). A woman in the study who expressed her wish to have her ashes scattered noted, ‘I feel I will be punished [by Heaven] if I do not provide proper memorial services to my family members who are deceased’ (207). One aspect of this norm is that individuals do not feel that they need to plan or worry a great deal about their own funeral arrangements. Ino notes that, An individual’s death was not something that individual thinks about but rather a matter that person’s family and offspring think about. Traditionally, Japanese have neglected facing and thinking about their own death by allocating death within the realm of the ie (家) or family structure. But due to Japan’s recent social changes and the individualization of the family system, people are now forced to face their own death without choice. Ino, 2006: p. 197 Other scholars similarly note that Japan positions an individuals’ death within the realm of the family (Ino, 2006; Okinawa, 2004; Shimazono, 2009). They also argue that traditional family responsibilities and support have been gradually decreasing due to the individualization of Japanese society. They note the increase of cases in which family members refuse to accept elderly kin within their family (Ino, 2006; Okinawa, 2004).

6  Analysis and conclusion: dependency, demographic change, individualism, and re-valuing bonds In a society such as Japan, where interdependent construals of selfhood are much more the norm, the ability of individuals to depend on family members to look after their death can bring a degree of peace of mind to a situation that would otherwise be filled with anxiety. The psychiatrist Takeo Doi wrote extensively on the Japanese concept of amae, or dependency, and the role this plays in Japanese society. Amae points to the expectations that the people in Japan have that their companies, families, and even society will look after them. To work at a company in Japan has been often compared with marriage (Doi, 1981). Until recently, lifetime employment was the norm in Japan, and it is still common. As a result, one person tends to stay at the same company throughout his or her life. The company provides financial, medical, and retirement security. Against the context of individualistic notions in the United States where many valorize the idea of being a ‘self-made man’ or ‘self-made woman,’ the Japanese notion of amae may appear self-indulgent or even childish. But in Japan, individuals are understood as 91

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inter-dependent. The notion of a self-made person is typically seen as unrealistic and naive, a failure to acknowledge the fact that human activity in a society is highly interrelated and that its members depend on each other for every aspect of their existence.This Japanese notion of amae reflects the belief that individuals cannot exist without the presence of others. Mutual reliance is inevitable and necessary. In such a society, it makes sense that families play a dominant role when a family member faces death to take the burden of responsibilities in making final decisions. Against these cultural norms, Japanese society has been moving away from the traditional collectivist society to a more increasingly individualistic society. This trend manifests in the recent demographic shift from the extended family to the nuclear family, and to single-member households. Individualism as an ideology has been affecting Japanese people. As shown in demographic shifts, an increasing number of individuals lead a more individualistic lifestyle, often away from their aging parents and often alone and without a partner. In times of crisis, however, such as in the wake of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, the Japanese people have turned to concepts such as kizuna or bonds, as they recognize the value of family and personal connections. After that particular disaster, for example, more young adults started spending vacation time visiting their parents (Fukuyama and Tamura, 2011: p. 29). The weekly magazine AERA began running special articles on kizuna and this trend towards emphasizing family ties (2011). According to a survey that was conducted with 1,200 men and women between their 20s and 60s, over 80% responded that they felt a re-valuing of certain relationships. Among those relationships, 54% were relationships with parents (Dentsu, 2011), a finding echoed by other surveys (Fukuyama and Tamura, 2011; Takahashi and Masaki, 2012). During my ethnographic research among survivors of the Great East Japan Earthquake, I had a chance to visit several groups of survivors living in temporary housing in North Ibaragi,Yokohama, and around Tokyo. Many of those I interviewed responded that the bonds they created among themselves at the temporary housing helped them to maintain hope. I also learned that people make a special effort among themselves at temporary housing communities to monitor each other in order to prevent solitary deaths among themselves. Mr. Takamatsu, the leader of a North Ibaragi temporary housing complex told me, I really felt that establishing kizuna was most necessary. So I thought about what must be the strong bond people here could find and establish among each other. What is shared among all of these people is having experienced the Great Japan Earthquake and Tsunami and the nuclear disaster of March 2011. So I thought we should talk about the natural disaster. Even after such an attempt, I felt that the bond was not established . . . Talking about radiation, this place is only 85 kilometers (52.8 miles) from the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Reactor and some areas in North Ibaragi are only 70 kilometers (43.5 miles) from the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Reactor. So I thought that perhaps we should talk about the radiation issue. Finally we felt that we had established the sense of kizuna among us. In July, this community organized a summer festival.The community members try to take care of each other so that there would be no solitary deaths among the elderly. Personal interview on October 11, 2011 As noted, the traditional view in Japan has been that the elderly would approach death surrounded by their family.The sense that the family will assume the responsibility of arranging the death means that individuals do not need to worry about such matters. But the increasing number of single-member households in Japan is one clear indication that such ‘families’ who will look after the death of an individual will not exist if a plurality of Japanese end up living alone. 92

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This trend contributes to the recent emphasis on kizuna, or bonds, in Japanese society. When people are deeply embedded within a family structure, kin-related bonds inevitably exist regardless of their wishes. They can sever the bond by disconnecting themselves from the entire family but otherwise their bonds are an expected and normative outcome. People leading a single life often need to actively seek alternative bonds beyond the family. The Japanese scholar Kameoka notes that Japan has been shifting from a society dominated by traditional (family) bonds to ‘modern bonds’ with friends, neighbors, and community (Kameoka, 2011). According to Kameoka, the young and elderly have the most necessity for these modern bonds (2011). In recent years, an increasing number of people intentionally or unintentionally left their local communities either by the relocation of their jobs, or by going to colleges that are far from their hometown. In one way, people have freed themselves from the rigid ties and obligations that come with their local communities and freed themselves from their neighbors’ eyes (Ozawa-de Silva, 2015; Zielenziger, 2007). But at the same time, such recent shifts seem to have created a lack of community and family support. In the traditional family system, the oldest son’s family assumes the responsibility of caring for aging parents by living with them. Like many other traditional societies, however, Japan has been moving away from the extended family system toward nuclear families and single-member households. In a society where families have traditionally owned the death of an individual, this change has led to an increasing anxiety about what will happen at the time of death if one is alone. Key words: solitary death, culture of fear, aging, social isolation, suicide

Further reading Lock, M. (2001) Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death. Berkeley: California Press. Lock offers an anthropological look at the complicated issue of brain death and organ transplantation in Japan. Long. S. (2005) Final Days: Japanese Culture and Choice at the End of Life. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. An anthropological book that surveys end of life issues in Japan. Ohnuki-Tierney, E. (1984) Illness and Culture in Contemporary Japan: An Anthropological View. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ohnuki-Tierney’s volume serves as an anthropological book on the medical practices and understanding of illness in Japan. Ozawa-de Silva, C. (2008) ‘Too Lonely to Die Alone: Internet Suicide Pacts and Existential Suffering in Japan,’ Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 32(4), pp. 516–55. An anthropological article on internet group suicide and subjective loneliness among suicidal Japanese.

Bibliography 2010 Japan Census (2011). Statistics Bureau of Japan, October 26. Available at: www.stat.go.jp/english/ data/kokusei/pdf/20111026.pdf. Aoyagi, R. (2008) ‘Kodoku-Shi no Shakaiteki Haikei’ [Social Background of the Solitary Death], in: Nakazawa,T. and Aoyagi, R. (eds). Danchi to Kodoku-Shi [Apartment Buildings and Solitary Death].Tokyo: Chuo Shuppan, pp. 79–103. Con, I. (2006) Shinu Jiyu to iu Na no Sukui [Salvation in the Name of ‘Freedom or Death’]. Tokyo: Kawade Shobō. Dentsu (2011) Shinsai wo Kekka to Shita Kizuna no Minaoshi [Rethinking Bonds After the Earthquake Disaster]. Dentsu [online]. Available at: www.dentsu.co.jp/news/release/pdf-cms/2011083-0715.pdf. [Accessed 30 May 2017].

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Chikako Ozawa-de Silva Doi,T. (1981) The Anatomy of Dependence.Translated by J. Bester. 2nd Edition.Tokyo: Kodansha International. Fukukawa, Y. and Kawaguchi, K. (2011) ‘Kodoku-shi no Hassei narabi ni Yobō-Taisaku no Jisshi Jōkyō ni Kansuru Zenkou Jichitai Chosa’ [National Survey on the Actual Situation of the Rise of Solitary Death and Its Preventions], Nihon Kōei Shi, 58(11), pp. 959–966. Fukuyama, E. and Tamura, E. (2011) ‘Kazoku no Kizuna Tashikameau’ [Confirming the Family Bond], AERA, 41, pp. 28–29. Fujimori, K. (2010) Tanshin-sha Kyuzo Shakai no Shogeki [Shock of a Society with Increasing Number of Singles]. Tokyo: Nipon Keisai Shinbun. Garbage News (2017) Nippon no heikin jumyō no suii o gurafu ka shit e miru (saishin) [An Attempt to Graph the Trend of Japan’s Average Life Expectancy (latest)]. Garbage News [online]. 28 July. Available at: www. garbagenews.net/archives/1940398.html. [Accessed 30 May 2017]. Kagawa, R. and Mori, K. (2004) Netto Ohji to Keitai Hime: Higeki wo fusagutame no Chie [Internet King and Mobile Phone Princess:Wisdom for Preventing Tragic]. Tokyo: Chuo Koron-sha. Kameoka, M. (2011) Gendai-Nihonjin no Kizuna: ‘Chotto-shita Tunagari’ no Shohi Shakai-ron [Contemporary Japanese Bonds: Consumer Social Theories On ‘A Little Bonds’].Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Shinbun Shuppan-sha. Kitanaka, J. (2011) Depression in Japan: Psychiatric Cures for a Society in Distress. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kleinman, A. (1988) Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition. New York: Basic Books. Kotsuji, H. and Kobayashi, M. (2011) ‘Kodoku-Shi Hodo no Rekishi’ [The History of the Reporting Solitary Death], Core Ethics 7, pp. 121–130. Kudo, T. (2013) ‘ “Muen-Shakai” to “Tsunagari” ni Kansuru Kenkyu no Seika to Kadai’ [‘Indifferent Society’ and ‘Bonds’: Research Results and Tasks], Shin Jyoho, 101(11), pp. 42–48. Ino, S. (2006) ‘Kazoku no Kojinka to Shisei-kan’ [Individualization of Family and Views of Death and Life], Shisei-gaku Kenkyu, 7(3), pp. 197–213. Lock, M. (2001) Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death. Berkeley: California Press. Long, S. (2005) Final Days: Japanese Culture and Choice at the End of Life. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Metcalf, P. and Huntington, R. (1991) Celebrations of Death:The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual. 2nd Edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ministry of International Affairs and Communications (2016) Heisei 27nen Kokuzei Chosa (2015 Census). Available at: www.stat.go.jp/data/kokusei/2015/kekka/pdf/c_youyaku.pdf. [Accessed 30 May 2017]. Naritomi, M. (2009) ‘Danchi to Hitori Gurashi Kōreisha’ [Apartment Buildings and Single-Living Elderly], Bunka Ren Joho, 371, pp. 18–22. Nihon Keizai Shinbun (2016) Tanshin Setai San-bun no Ichi Kosu [Single-member Households Reach More than 1/3 of the Population]. Nihon Keizai Shinbun [online], 17 October. Available at: www.nikkei.com/article/ DGXLASFS26H7U_W6A021C1EA2000/. [Accessed 20 July 2017]. Nippon no Kaigo-gaku (2014) Korei-sha no Kodokushi ha naze Fueru? [Why Does the Solitary Death Increase?]. Nippon no Kaigo-gaku [online], 9 October. Available at: www.minnanokaigo.com/news/N23198352/. [Accessed 30 May 2017]. Ohnuki-Tierney, E. (1984) Illness and Culture in Contemporary Japan: An Anthropological View. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Okinawa, T. (2004) ‘Anraku-shi Mondai ni Mirareru Nihon-jin no Shisei-kan’ [Japanese notion of Death and Life Through Euthanasia Issue], Bulletin of Teikyo University Junior College, 24, pp. 69–95. Ozawa-de Silva, C. (2008) ‘Too Lonely to Die Alone: Internet Suicide Pacts and Existential Suffering in Japan,’ Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 32(4), pp. 516–555. Ozawa-de Silva, C. (2010) ‘Shared Death: Self, Sociality and Internet Group Suicide in Japan,’ Transcultural Psychiatry, 47(3), pp. 392–418. Ozawa-de Silva, C. (2015) ‘The Hidden Gaze and the Self that Is Seen: Reflections of a Japanese Anthropologist,’ in: DeVita, P. R. and Armstrong, J. D. (eds). Distant Mirrors: America as a Foreign Culture. 4th Edition. Illinois: Waveland. Pinguet, M. (1993) Voluntary Death in Japan. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ryall, J. (2016) ‘Why Organ Transplant is so Difficult to Carry Out in Japan,’ DW Made for Mind [online]. Available at: www.dw.com/en/why-organ-transplant-is-so-difficult-to-carry-out-injapan/a-36733213. [Accessed 13 June 2017]. Shibui, T. (2007) Wakamono tachi ha naze jisatsu surunoka [Why Do Young People Commit Suicide?]. Tokyo: Nagasaki Shuppan.

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Stand by me Shimazono, S. (2009) ‘Kindai Nihon-jin no Shisei-kan’ [Contemporary Japanese Notion of Death and Life], Kokushikan Philosophy [online], pp. 1–14. Available at: https://kokushikan.repo.nii.ac.jp/? action=repository_uri&item_id=6407. [Accessed 23 June 2017]. Sōmushō Tōkeikyoku (2012) Kokuzei Chōsa kara Wakatta koto [What was Revealed by the National Census], Sōmushō Tōkeikyoku [online]. Available at: www.stat.go.jp/data/kokusei/2010/users-g/wakatta.htm. [Accessed 22 July]. Tada, T. (2013) ‘Yomei Kokuchi de 4500-man En wo Seikyu sareta Byoin’ [A Hospital that was Sued for $450,000 Compensation], JP Press [online]. April 2. Available at: http://jbpress.ismedia.jp/articles/-/ 37453. [Accessed 28 June 2017]. Takahashi, K. and Masaki, M. (2012) ‘Higashi Nihion Shinsai de Nihonjin ha dou Kawattaka’ [How Japanese Changed Since the Great East Japan Earthquake], Hōsō Kenkyū to Chōsa, June, pp. 34–55. Takahashi,Y. (2001) Jisatsu no sain wo yomitoru [Reading a Signal of Suicide]. Tokyo: Kodansha. Zielenziger, M. (2007) Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation, New York:Vintage Departures.

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9 POLITICS OF DEATH AND MORTUARY RITUALS IN TRINIDADIAN HINDUISM Priyanka Ramlakhan

1 Introduction In the last 100 years, Hindu death rituals and grieving culture have been transformed by a series of social and political events which have altered the social performance and polyvalent attitudes of Trinidadian Hinduism.The legalization of cremation became controversial during indentureship largely due to what historian Sherry Ann Singh has called ‘ideological’ differences on how the Christian-informed state viewed ‘disposal of the dead’ (Singh, 2010: p. 359). Denied the right to cremate their dead for nearly a century, Trinidadian Hindus began to ‘Hinduize’ their burials by incorporating elements of traditional cremation rituals during and after the burial. The Cremation Ordinance of 1953 legalized the Hindu method of cremation, particularly open air burning, and the disposal of ashes into a river. However, the decree’s extensive stipulations made cremation difficult, resulting in Hindu negotiations with the state over the next two decades, until cremation finally displaced burial. Social activism dedicated to Indian rights and religious revival led to the development of extensive Hindu mortuary ceremonies and death culture in the island-nation. Orthopraxy, an immense concern among Hindu elites, was established by authorizing discourses of the Rāmcaritmānas1 and Garuḍapurān ̣a,2 oral traditions, and the intuitive ‘feeling’ of pandits (priests) as to the ‘proper’ performance of death rituals. The reframing of religious practices and customs according to its diasporic context and landscape resulted in a completely localized Trinidadian Hinduism. The present chapter explores the theological and liturgical articulation of death rituals and crematorium practices of Trinidadian Hindus from the colonial period to a now post-independent nation. In addition to drawing from historical and textual sources, I ground this inquiry in phenomenological approaches by including voices from Hindu pandits and laity. In this chapter, I first discuss the Hindu view of death, followed by the socio-political context by which Hinduism in Trinidad emerged, and the ritualistic manifestations of its mortuary practices. I argue that transformations in tradition have not only resulted in a fully enculturated and distinctive strand of Hinduism, but the discourses surrounding death and mourning practices illuminate the politics of resistance and community-building solidarity among Hindus in Trinidad. In Hinduism, death does not mark the finality of living, rather it is viewed as one event in a series of transitory experiences upon a spectrum of beginning-less consciousness. Death and dying are viewed through the several lenses of philosophy, ritual, and social and cultural norms, 96

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and have been elaborated upon extensively in the vast corpus of Hindu literature. The most basic concept of life is built upon the philosophical notions of the ātman, an individual’s immortal existence that has a shared identity with brahman, the supreme being. The individual being (jīvātman) survives death and is subject to reincarnation; death is merely a consequence of the physical body. The cessation of rebirth is theologically conceived of in multiple ways, however it is generally understood to end upon the individual’s attainment of mokşa, or liberation of the soul. For Hindus, mokşa is the ultimate attainment that transcends material life. Brian Smith posits that in Hinduism, ‘the problem is not so much death itself as it is continual, perpetual, and potentially eternal rebirth’ (Smith, 2000: p. 98). Therefore, emphasis is placed on how individuals live in the world (sam . sāra), and to what extent they perform their dharma. Dharma, the cornerstone of Hindu thought, translates as ‘that which is established or firm’ and is synonymous with righteousness, duty, law, and ethics (Monier-Williams, 2008: p. 510). In Hindu philosophytheology, dharma and moks ̣a endure a symbiotic relationship where dharma dictates actions required for both secular as well as spiritual attainments. Governed by the ‘law of karma,’ action (karma) yields meritorious and demeritorious ‘fruits’ that influence the present and future birth of the soul (Smith, 2000: p. 98). Hence, the performance of ritual sacrifices (yajña), inherited from Vedic religion, was designed for accumulation of merit that ensured rewards within one’s own life, in the afterlife, and to secure a desirable rebirth.The antyes ̣ti,̣ or the ‘final sacrifice’ of the human life, falls into the category of domestic life-cycle rituals, termed as sam . skāras, that ensure the transition from one stage of life to another. Death itself is a unique category in ritual performance that is framed between conceptions of purity and pollution. A deceased body is considered inauspicious, during the final death rites, the body itself, though still impure, becomes worshipful as it is the final offering to the gods (Flood, 1996: p. 207; Smith, 2000: p. 104).With a few exceptions, it is incumbent that Hindus are cremated as fire burns away physical ties to the phenomenal world and secures the soul’s transition to an ancestor status. Moreover, the performance of death rituals is an explicitly Hindu duty that simultaneously repays the debts of their forbearers and demonstrates our indebtedness to them.

2  Historical context Hinduism was first transplanted in Trinidad through the memories of indentured laborers who arrived during its British occupation and has been the subject of several scholarly studies (Klass, 1988; Vertovec, 1992; Younger, 2010; Singh, 2005). Since 1628, Trinidad has had a history of colonial settlement during which African slaves were originally brought by Europeans to cultivate sugar. Britain seized control of Trinidad in 1802, coinciding with the abolition of the Slave Trade. Free Africans who once worked on sugar plantations left an economic void for the capitalist-minded British, who turned their sights to India.The British developed the indentureship program based on labor contracts and fixed wages, yet it fared as a ‘disguised’ version of slavery (Brereton, 1981: pp. 100, 101). Indentureship lasted from 1845 to 1917, with a reported 143,939 Indians arriving to work on sugar plantations on five and ten-year renewable contracts with the option of returning to India, though most elected to remain in Trinidad. The majority of Indians were Bhojpuri3 and Hindi speaking Hindus who hailed from North Indian provinces, a region dominated by Brahmanical Hinduism. Each group brought strands of Hinduism that differed greatly, but over time a constructed form of Hinduism emerged that subsumed dominant practices. Practicing Hinduism under stringent colonial rule and amidst harsh living conditions inhibited its growth particularly as Hindus were regarded as pagans and accused of uncivilized practices well into the post-indentureship era. Mahine Gosine writes that both indentured and free Indians released from their contracts were ‘unfree, hedged in by 97

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a multiplicity of laws restricting their freedom of movement and action’ and ‘social life’ was ‘subordinate’ to colonial agendas (Gosine, 1986: pp. 108, 110). Morton Klass’ study found that ‘Indian customs and religious practices were derided and even forbidden,’ further ‘cremation was not possible’ (Klass, 1988: p. 25). The socio-cultural context resulted in complexities in how the diaspora reimagined Hinduism, encountering both fundamental ideological differences amongst themselves, and how they developed religion overshadowed by the hegemony of colonialism. Brahmin Hindu pandits4 in Trinidad assumed the authoritative role of negotiating the direction of Hinduism and its orthopraxy (Vertovec, 1992: p. 100) and actively participated in social movements. Formal organization and expressions of public resistance created uncontested Hindu agency. In 1881, the Sanatan Dharma Association formed to advocate for Hindus, and later in 1897, the East Indian National Association (EINA) mobilized in reaction to ordinances that ‘infringed upon the rights’ of Indians. Major organizational shifts occurred in 1952 when Bhadase Sagan Maharaj, an Indian philanthropist and politician, merged existing Sanatan associations into the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha, and served as its president from 1940 to 1971, during a formidable time of Hindu growth and revival. In 1950, Bhadase also founded the People’s Democratic Party, which later merged with the Democratic Labour Party in May of 1957. Concurrently, strong arbiters of Hinduism included affiliated independent Hindu organizations and the Arya Samaj.5 Today, the direction of Brahmanical doxa and praxis is negotiated by the Mahasabha along with Swaha International, established in 1993.Though Hindus were efficiently mobilized, they still experienced the pressure of political alienation. The Black Power Movement (PNM) occupied state administration from 1956 to 1981, and held interests ‘diametrically opposed’ to Indian agendas. Cultural differences between Indians and Africans and the competition for economic resources further divided these groups. Indians claimed the PNM ‘has tended to perpetuate the interests of Blacks at the expense of the Indians, a situation which has only served to widen the cultural, political, and economic gap between the two groups’ (Gosine, 1986: pp. 6, 7). When the National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR) assumed leadership under Patrick Manning (1986–1991; 1995–2001), Indians experienced another administration that ‘ignored’ their interests. Trinidad saw its first Indian-Hindu Prime Minister, Basdeo Pandey, when the United National Congress (UNC) came to power in 1995. Pandey shaped an open platform that purported to cater to needs of all ethnicities, though Africans may disagree. With an Indian administration in parliament, Hindu initiatives advanced with state support, despite Pandey’s brief term in office. Trinidad’s Hinduism came to flourish amidst complexities wrought in a context of ethnic, religious, and economic tensions. Scholars called the 1970s and the 1980s the ‘Hindu Renaissance’ as it was a formidable time when religio-cultural initiatives and social awareness grew immensely from intellectually and economically empowered Hindus (Younger, 2010: pp. 113, 114).

3  State interventions in Hindu cremation Sherry Ann Singh argues that ‘cultural diversity has consistently underscored intriguing, sometimes tumultuous dialogue between the state and various elements of the society’ (Singh, 2005: p. 353). During the colonial period, the state sustained a mediating presence in Indian life regulating all aspects of their social, economic, and religious life. A critical area where the government intervened was through the prohibition of Hindu cremation. The state was largely informed by Christian views on the disposal of the dead, and though there were also a large population of Indian Muslims in Trinidad, because they also adhered to burials, Hindus were alone in their struggle. The strife between divergent religious ideologies among Hindus in a predominantly 98

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Christian state was a contentious issue and legalization of cremation was achieved slowly. The first recorded cases of Hindu cremation took place in Frederick Estate in 1880 after the remains of an indentured laborer were found on a wooden pyre alongside the Caroni River. Relatives responsible for the cremation were immediately arrested and jailed. The few Hindu cremations that occurred in early twentieth century erupted in judicial consequences for responsible survivors. According to the Health Ordinance of 1915, cremation of a body was permissible, however the governor of the estate authorized in which cases it could occur, and it was solely connected to the prevention of infectious diseases. In 1936, the Health Ordinance was modified to allow for cremations, but only those strictly supervised by a sanitation worker.The number of permits required and the inability to gain permissions from sanitation workers forced Hindus to continue to bury their dead. Indians, who were largely English illiterate, were further confounded with a daunting administrative process. From these circumstances, an iconic Hindu-style of burial with a modified form of rituals traditionally associated with cremation emerged. Morton Klass’ study on East Indians in Trinidad points out that in the mid-1900s, Hindus lamented over the institutionalized practice of the Hindu burial, arguing their dead required cremation: I heard men expressing their bitterness at having to bury the deceased: why, they wished to know, was cremation – so important to Hindus – forbidden by law? Hindu dead were buried in a nearby cemetery because the living had no choice . . . but in most cases no stone was erected and no grave care given: effectively, the remains were treated as if they had been cremated and had dissipated into flowing water and blowing wind. Klass, 1991: p. 37 Hindu burials incorporated distinctive traditions completely unrecognizable from their Christian and Islamic counterparts. Firstly, Hindus built their own coffins using cedar wood decorated from the reddish staining of teak tree leaves and adorned with small flags (jhandis). An earthen fire-lit lamp, or a diya, was placed at the head of the body, and throughout the burial, mantras, or sacred incantations, were recited to ensure smooth transition of the soul in its journey to the afterlife. Tombstones were never erected and graves were left unmarked because Hindus did not believe it was the final resting place of the departed. Upon returning home, families in the early 1900s recall the practice of spreading ashes into a large pan with a diya at the center, and members were instructed to not view the tray until the next day. The next morning, they analyzed patterns left by the ashes, and its morphed form was believed to indicate the type of animal or human birth the soul would be reborn as. Even though cremations were not done, fire and ash remained important elements of death, and were likely taken from the kitchen cūlha – a small stove heated by burning wood and charcoal (R. N. Maharaj). Despite the illegality of cremation, Indians fashioned a method of ‘Hinduizing’ their burial practices. In 1953, the Ministry of Agriculture and Lands finally conceded to Hindu demands by legally permitting cremation. However, its legality incorporated strict restrictions on the public burning of corpses and how to deposit its remains into natural water bodies. Essentially, the state agreed to cremation bereft of its accompanying Hindu rites, which was of little use to Hindus (Singh, 2010: p. 211). In the following year, the state drafted an addendum with a new set of criteria that restricted cremation by requiring Hindus to obtain a cremation license along with additional administrative guidelines (Cremation Act, 1953). The new ordinance dictated that the ceremony must be conducted at least 15 feet away from residences and 75 yards from any road. Cremations were also to be screened from public viewing, and from animals and birds; and ‘where it is not likely to be a nuisance,’ as the state argued that open-fire cremation would 99

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pose health risks to humans, animals, and the environment. The impossibility of adhering to these ordinances, and the consequence of legal punishment inevitably continued to force Hindus to bury their dead. Without options and state sanction, some Hindus risked its illegality by constructing cremation areas on the banks of the Caroni River. In Trinidad, the Caroni River had long been sacralized as an auspicious site by indentured laborers who likened it to Ganges River in India (Rampersad, 2014: p. 66). Over the next two decades, illegal cremations in Caroni persisted, enacting cycles of tension and at times violent interactions between Hindus and state officials. In 1970, the Cremation Regulation Amendments permitted ashes to be disposed of in rivers, and in 1976, the Cremation Ordinance was further amended to include a simplified four-step process. This included a formal application, a death certificate from the attending doctor, a certificate of confirmation from a District Medical Officer, and a cremation license from a police inspector. Though the process continued to be immensely challenging, Indians could cremate their dead according Hindu customs (Singh, 2012: p. 88).The latter half of the twentieth century saw a dramatic change in Hindu death culture as traditions were innovated, and rituals reclaimed as cremations became the norm. In 2015, Sat Maharaj, the current leader of the Maha Sabha, remarked on the trajectory of Hindu’s right to cremate, recalling that in the mid-twentieth century how the ‘Sanatana Dharma Maha Sabha had to wage a public campaign to ensure that we were able to dispose of the dead according to ancient rites and rituals.’ Maharaj further stated, Today there is a complete turnaround of public opinion which spoke about “Hindus barbecuing the dead.” Obituary notices in newspapers speak of cremation according to Christian rites. Maharaj, 2015 Although the Maha Sabha’s efforts, especially in the 1950s when the Cremation Ordinance was passed, were critical to gaining state recognition, other Hindu groups were also influential. While not a focus of this chapter, it is important to mention that the work of Arya Samaj missionaries who visited Trinidad from India in the early twentieth century normalized the practice of Hindu life cycle rituals, particularly death rituals. The passing of the Cremation Ordinance further emerged in an era immediately following the economic elevation of Indians, and a time where social Hindu reformism and a deep interest in culture dominated. Bridget Brereton notes that in the 1920s and 1930s Indo-Trinidadians were in touch with India through news publications and the affluent began visiting India. ‘Missionaries, musicians, and dancers’ as well as the introduction of Indian films fortified Indian culture in Trinidad (Brereton, 1981: p. 239). Each of these cultural markers directly impacted growing social consciousness of Trinidadian Hinduism. Recently, a collection of unburned bodily remains which are polluting river banks has attracted the attention of environmental activists, contributing to rising tension regarding open air cremation. In a 2017 article, the Trinidad Guardian reported that ‘remains of bodies cremated at the Caroni site are piling up one on top the other on an embankment of the Caroni river.’ The Maha Sabha responded with their detestation of the collection of human remains, arguing it is not in accordance with the disposal protocol of the Garuḍapurān ̣a. While Hindus are no longer fighting for the right to cremate their dead, environmental and sanitation concerns may prompt them to yet again renegotiate how to handle the remains of their departed. It may be that electric crematoriums, which are already in prevalent use, might become the preferred method. Given the contentious history of legalized cremations, it is likely that orthodox groups will come forward to preserve a centuries-old tradition that is only less than a hundred years old in Trinidad. 100

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Historical transformations and development of Hindu spaces within a multi-ethnic and multicultural society contributed to the emergence of idiosyncratic religious traditions that are ethnically Trinidadian. Hindu mortuary rituals have historically been directly connected to social movements dedicated to the defense and revival of Hinduism Trinidad. In the following section, I explore dimensions of voices, texts, and customs and practices, some of which are pan-Hindu, but several indigenous to Trinidad.

4  Hindu mortuary rituals traditions: textual, oral, and enculturated practices Time of death Hindus engage in elaborate death rituals that last up to two weeks after the death of a person and are continued annually. Upon impending death, Hindus immediately call their family pandit for guidance to ensure a ‘good death’ for the soul. Before and after death, relatives are responsible for cultivating a harmonious environment and maintaining ritual purity through meditative thoughts and fasting. Thought power has long been linked to Upanisadic6 ideologies as elevated thoughts bear relationship to higher realms of existence and the realization of oneness with supreme being (brahman). The final thought of an individual determines the course of their journey after death, and the dying are advised to be vigilant in reciting mantras and meditating on their chosen deity. ‘Om namo bhagavate Vāsudevāya’ (om, I bow to Lord Vasudeva) is the most commonly prescribed mantra and venerates the Hindu deity Kr ̣sṇ ̣a. Pandits often reference the verse ‘A man who dies remembering me, at the time of death enters my being, when he is freed from his body; of this there is no doubt’ (BG 8.5). The departed listens to Vedic hymns, verses from the Upanisads, ̣ and other texts including the Rāmāyaṇa and the Bhagavadgītā (Kane, 1953: Part IV pp. 185, 186). During the time of impending death, a diya is placed at the head and the body is turned in a southward position. Following death, the diya remains lit every night in the same position until all rituals have been completed. At the time of death, a tulsi leaf and water from the Ganges River (gangājalam) are placed in the mouth, with the belief that they purify and wash away sins of the departed. From the moment a person has died, both the relatives and home itself experience a period of impurity. Local customs dictate that the family goes into an official period of mourning for a year.The family home of departed often expresses visible indications of loss that include the turning of portraits on the walls, the removal of window dressings and the hanging of white sheets in place of them, the stripping of décor, and an elaborate cleaning of the floors and walls (Sharma Maharaj;Vertovec, 1992: p. 206). Ritual purity and its connection with food is a major concern during this time. Because the house is viewed as polluted, no food is cooked in the home until all death rituals have been completed. In Hinduism, food plays an integral role in psychological, physical, and spiritual development. Vasudha Narayanan states the ‘act of eating is a ritual’ and it is ‘ceremoniously offered to ancestors, deities, birds and beasts, guests, and other human beings.’ Moreover, Hindus adhere to varying degrees of ritual injunctions concerning food and depending on the context, specific fasting and feasting diets are implemented (Narayanan, 2012). During death rituals, priests advise relatives to observe a strict vegetarian fast that omits salt and grains and consists of fruits and boiled root vegetables. Ritual purity is important, because just as food forms the physical human body, it too constitutes the nature of the mind and its thoughts. Certain foods promote the varying tendencies of ‘purity’ (satva), ‘passion’ and ‘activity’ (rajas), and ‘inertia’ (tamas). Recommended diets include ‘pure’ foods to influence the individual consciousness in a positive way and allow for the concentration required to perform rituals and cope with loss. 101

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Furthermore, it is generally held that malignant influences and disembodied spirits linger in the places where death has occurred. The entire mourning process has been culturally fashioned to foster divine vibrations and repel negativity. Grieving periods mark a societal break where relatives disengage from celebrations and weddings, and postpone major life decisions, but the degree to which relatives restrict of social engagement varies and is the subject of ongoing debate. While a family disengages from society during the period of mourning, ‘the community comes together’ and lends support for what one pandit has called the ‘undeniable social aspect’ of offering ‘dignity’ to the departed (R. Maharaj). Anthropologist Steven Vertovec also points out that mortuary rituals are a ‘rich assembly of both collectively construed and pundit-directed ritual sequences’ in which the ‘death of an individual entails a rapid mobilization of kinship and friendship networks’ (Vertovec, 1992: p. 205).

Wake culture In many cultures after a family member has died, it is customary for relatives to hold a ‘wake’ in their homes during the night of the death. In Trinidad, the wake has transformed into a nearly two-week process complete with daily ritual injunctions along with singing and scriptural readings during nightly gatherings – satsangas. The highly social nightly satsangas feature bhajans (devotional songs) and chanting from sacred texts like the Rāmacaritamānas and the Bhagavadgītā. Devotional Indian music of the North Indian Tumuri style has long been established as religious and cultural identity marker of Indo-Trinidadians. In this style, innovative genres of music were developed, including Hindu dirges that elicit emotions of somberness and rejuvenation. H. S. Adesh, a Professor of Hinduism and the founder of Bharatiya Vidya Sansthaan, an institute for Indian arts, is credited with initiating a cultural revival in Trinidad since the 1960s (Myers, 1993: p. 139.) Adesh, an accomplished Hindustani musician and poet, observed the social need for elegies and laments during the period of death. His poetry articulates Hindu-philosophical views on the fleeting nature of life, human bondage, and immortality of the soul. ‘Pinjre Ke Panchhi Re’ (‘caged bird’) is another iconic lament of wake culture and is originally a 1957 Bollywood classic composed and sung by the poet Pradeep. Its lyrics speak of an encaged bird that silently leads a life of pain and sorrow and is a poetic rendering of the human soul that is trapped and must suffer the consequences of its own accumulated actions – a destiny it cannot escape (Behl and Rawat, undated: p. 164). Singing for the dead is a significant way of coping with grief and encourages the transition of the departed soul. It is believed the deceased continues to linger in its home and among its relatives and is constantly listening, therefore music is a key feature of Hindu grieving as it generates a hospitable atmosphere, and offers solace for the surviving and dead. Discourses on the Rāmcaritmānas became a regularized socio-religious practice since indentureship period, and so too was its inclusion in wake and death ceremonies. Musicians who were skilled in the recitation of the Rāmāyaṇa are regarded as ‘Rāmāyaṇists’ and often volunteer or are hired to recite the Rāmāyaṇa during the ten to thirteen-day period when offerings are being made to the departed soul. Formal public processions featuring amplified recordings of Rāmcaritmānas accompanied the body to the cremation ground, and became routinized as ‘standard’ culture by the 1980s. The loud recitation of ‘Rāmā nāmā satya hai,’ meaning ‘in the name of Rama lies truth,’ is also chanted during processions (Singh, 2012: p. 88). Nightly gatherings held in the home of the departed almost always include a reading from the Rāmcaritmānas, that recount common stories (kathas) that emphasize life and death of its legendary figures. To alleviate the burden of maintaining nightly satsangas, the Hindu Prachar Kendra of Long­ denville, Trinidad, implemented trainings and do-it-yourself protocols. Funerary 102

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arrangements are a financial burden for many families, and the continuity of rituals for thirteen days are met with difficulty especially when survivors are unable to secure a pandit and a singing group to lead evening discourses. More and more Hindus are taking it upon themselves to conduct evening prayers with the support and instruction from their local family pandit or temple. The Kendra, under the leadership of Pandita Geeta Ramsingh, known as ‘Geetaji,’ has developed a collection of literary resources for families to be autonomous in the absence of pandits and singing groups, of which she states, reinforce a ‘self-sufficient community.’ Resources include mantras for daily recitation, devotional songs, verses from the Bhagavadgītā, and Ramayana kathas or stories that highlight episodes featuring characters who personify dharmic teachings and offer a model for righteous living.When a death has occurred, relatives of the departed feel incumbent to ensure all rituals are carried out ‘properly,’ and all nightly services are held, generating intense ‘pressure’ for a family. The Kendra participates in a pragmatic approach that Geetaji describes as ‘keeping a family together praying and comforting each other.’ In her view, locating a pandit or singing group shouldn’t be the main focus, rather it is about creating an atmosphere of satsanga with whatever resources one has, whether it be reciting a few verses from scriptures, or listening to devotional recordings (Ramsingh). This approach is appealing to Hindus who yearn for ritual practice bereft of a priest, and youth who interrogate the necessity of priest-led traditions. It is likely we will continue to contend with more innovative approaches that promote Hindu autonomy.

5  Sources of ritual: text and local interpretations During the 1980s and 1990s, the Garuḍapurān ̣a and the Bhagavadgītā grew as popular texts of nightly discourse, but the Garuḍapurān ̣a ascended as the foremost authority concerning death, dying, and afterlife.Though the Garuḍapurān ̣a had always been part of the Trinidadian-Vaishnava canon, due to its elaborate descriptions of the afterlife and hellish regions, it was formerly associated with fear and apprehension, and therefore unpopular. During a period of Hindu revival in the 1990s, the hegemonic position of the Garuḍapurān ̣a was solidified, in part because of the growing observance of pitr ̣paks ̣a – the Hindu period dedicated to ancestors. Priests and laity regularly referenced this text, such to the extent that by name, the Garuḍapurān ̣a has become something of a trope and living text that incorporates local oral traditions. Some orthodox priests strictly maintain its ritual integrity, while others adhere to a modified adaptation. What You Need to Know About Hindu death Ceremonies, authored by Pandit Hardeo Persad of Swaha International, is an explanation of the ritual process, its significance, and implications for the departed soul. The Saral Antyeshti Sanskaar Vidhi by Pandit Khemraj Vyas is a publication of the Maha Saba and incorporates Sanskrit incantations drawn from the Garuḍapurān ̣a, Ḍgveda, Yajurveda, and Atharvaveda, as well Sanskrit and Hindi mantras of the Pret Manjari.7 Here, language reinforces a position of access as both priests and laity who are not skilled in reading Devanāgarī would not be able to follow Vyas’ manual. Language barriers are resolved in Death and the Soul’s Journey by Pandit Munelal Maharaj et al., with transliterated Sanskrit and Hindi and English commentary. Works by Hardeo,Vyas, and Maharaj et al. are significant attempts to make the ritual injunctions of the Garuḍapurān ̣a accessible. This is important as most Trinidadians do not possess the primary text and there are ritual and stylistic differences among priests; despite this, all priests argue for the Garuḍapurān ̣a as a ritual authority. Pandit Parasram Maharaj of the Mahasabha emphasizes that the text is vastly different from what the larger community practices because at times it deals with ‘primitive’ material and modern ‘adjustments.’ Yet still, Maharaj insists the Hindu community become more text-centered and devote time to understanding its ritual 103

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explanation, promoting that ‘all answers’ on death and the afterlife are found in the Garuḍapurān ̣a (P. Maharaj). In modifying and innovating centuries-old texts, pandits and practicing Hindus in Trinidad often place more emphasis on ‘feeling’ and doing what is deemed correct given their limitations and often ‘substitute ritual ingredients’ or ‘make-do’ with what is available. Nevertheless, informants repeatedly emphasized that theirs is the ‘right’ or ‘proper’ way to perform death rituals. In praxis, Hindu eschatology is flexible, so despite drawing upon similar framework, ritualistic idiosyncrasies exist. Contrasting views among ritual specialists generally deal with adaptations in procedure, duration, and who is qualified to perform rituals; nevertheless, families generally follow the guidance of their family pandit. In the following section, I illustrate a sketch of rites performed for the departed based upon textual and ethnographic data. Hindu traditions are fluid by nature, especially in their lived and performative expression; therefore, the following reflects an amalgamation of views on death rituals, but does not capture the entirety of the Trinidadian Hindu experience. Death ceremonies consist of four major parts – antyes ̣tị saṃskāra – ‘last sacrifice,’ dasgaatra – shaving, and the first and second śrāddha – ancestor rites. The antyes ̣tị saṃskāra is observed by Sanatana Hindus and Arya Samaj Hindus, though here I specifically focus on Sanatana traditions.

6 Antyesṭ ị Saṃskāra – final rites The antyesṭ ị ceremony is the final life-cycle ritual, and an obligatory dharmic duty for the surviving family who offers the body of the departed to agni, or fire. In Hinduism, saṃskāras facilitate a linear progression of life with rituals that begin before a soul takes birth and after they have departed. The newly deceased is assigned the status of a preta (ghost) and begins its first step in a series of transitory stages on their journey to becoming a pitr ̣ (ancestor) (Kane, 1953: p. 261). Death rituals allow the soul to graduate to a higher rung of consciousness, further necessitating family members to perform final rites. The ceremony is conducted immediately following death and preferably the same day. Haste is made because so long as the physical body remains, it tethers the ātmān, preventing it from moving on to its next destination – pitr ̣loka, a celestial realm of the ancestors between heaven and earth, governed by Yama, the god of death. Performance of last rites is reserved for the son of the departed or a male relative, with exceptions. Pandita Indrani Rampersad remarks that women have historically been absent from death ceremonies in Trinidad, however their exclusion fell out of favor, as the surviving wife and/or daughters are eligible to perform death rituals if the departed is without a son (Rampersad). Inclusion of women, now a normative practice, is still at times criticized by orthodox practitioners. Significantly, though there are only a handful of Sanatan female priests today, they regularly officiate mortuary rituals (Ramsingh). The final ceremony incorporates the same elements of a Hindu pūjā (ritual worship) with the offering of several ingredients, some of which include water, tulsi leaves (holy basil), darbha grass, and flowers; and the seven orifices of the body are decked with a piece of gold and ghī (clarified butter). Pin ̣ḍas, or rice balls, are a mixture of rice flour, black sesame seeds, and honey and are rounded into balls that are cremated along with the body. Only male relatives are permitted to carry the body to the funeral pyre, and along the way five stops (manjils) are made for āratī (ceremony of the waving lights) to be performed. The five stops honor each of the five elements that comprise the body, and mark the ‘returning to its composite parts’ (Vertovec, 1992: p. 207). If an incinerator is used, the body is placed in feet first. Customarily, the body is burned upon a wooden funeral pyre, and while cremations are done in crematoriums, a vast number of Hindus elect the open-air method. In Trinidad, the three main areas designated for openair cremation are Mosquito Creek, Caroni, and the Temple in the Sea at Waterloo. Cremation 104

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grounds are an area for the departed to make their transition and a site for surviving relatives to experience closure in a visceral way through the ‘rite of the skull’ (kapāla kriya) (Parry, 1994: p. 177). Interlocutors report the cracking of the skull as a significant event during the ritual burning, and listen for it as an indication that the soul has begun its journey into the afterlife. If it is not broken during the cremation, then a family member punctures a hole in skull, thereby releasing the spirit from its last mortal coil. After three days, ashes are collected and scattered into a natural body of water. Many Hindus desire to have their ashes scattered in the Ganga, as its holy water is venerated for its ability to cleanse the sins of their previous lifecycles. The continuity of this faith has arisen in the sacralizing of rivers in Trinidad, especially the Caroni River revered as the Ganga of Trinidad since the early indentureship (Rampersad, 2014: p. 66). Days following cremation are an impressionable time when the soul of the departed is traveling, and ritual offerings make the difference between a soul that exists as a wandering spirit or progresses onwards. Therefore, a daily offering of a pin ̣ḍas is required to construct an astral body for the soul (sūksma/linga ̣ śarīra). After casting off the outer garment (i.e. the gross body) the man takes another body (the subtle one). In twelve days he is led by the attendants of Yama. From there meritorious man goes to heaven and the sinner to hell. GP I.225.3–4 The spirit of the deceased hovers near familiar places of its previously embodied life until the astral body is completed. It is through the astral body that the departed can travel and feed, and is fully formed in the first śrāddha ceremony following the dasgātra.

7 Dasgātra – ‘shaving’ ceremony The dasgātra, locally referred to as the ‘shaving,’ is a ceremony conducted by the male who performs the antyes ̣tị saṃskāra and occurs on the tenth day following cremation. The shaving ceremony is the ‘culmination of a period of sacrifice, prayer, yoga and striving for oneness with Divinity’ and is officiated by a Mahapātra, a Brahmin priest whose sole occupation is performing cremation rituals. Mahapātras are ritually seen as impure due to the nature of their work, and carry both the ‘sins’ and the ‘gifts’ of the dead (Vertovec, 1992: p. 208). The ritual consists of the ‘shaving of the head, a full purificatory bath, the worship and offering of the pin ̣ḍas, and gifts to the Mahapatra’ (Persad, 2016: p. 40). In Trinidad, there are several areas Hindus may conduct the shaving, though the most prominent is Caura. For more than sixty years, Caura has been a nature sanctuary for Hindus as its waters are ascribed sanctifying and healing properties. Remarkably, it is one of the few government-funded and sanctioned spaces reserved for Hindus to conduct the dasgātra ritual. Upon completion of the shaving, the former home of the deceased is deemed pure.

8  Śrād and feasting ceremony Śrāddha rituals, locally called the ‘śrād,’ ceremonially transition the consciousness of the soul to an ancestor status; the term śraddhā itself conveys both a confidence in the efficacy of the ritual and of the power of hospitality (Sayers, 2013: p. 66). The first śrād is performed on the twelfth or thirteenth day after death, while the second is completed on the death anniversary. Not all Hindus adhere to waiting a year to complete the final śrād, opting to conduct it immediately following the first śrād, and it is a highly sensitive issue among Trinidadian Hindus. Pandit 105

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Parasram Maharaj, referencing the Garuḍapurāṇa, maintains that the final śrād does not have to be completed in the eleventh month and can be performed within the two-week ritual period following the cremation of the departed.The initial śrād includes a pin ̣ḍa pūjā and a gītā pūjā, followed by the bandāra, a major ‘feast’ that reintegrates relatives of the deceased back into society. The pin ̣ḍa pūjā consists of the pin ̣ḍa dān, the gift of the rice ball and the sapin ̣ḍakarana, the ‘rite of uniting the dead.’ Rice balls serve two major functions – 1) feeding and nourishment of the soul while in Yama’s realm (GP I.225.3), and 2) the formation of the subtle body (GP II.26.12). Worship of the deity Kr ̣sṇ ̣a follows the gītā pūjā and includes the offering of a Bhagavadgītā, and a pandit-led discourse upon its teachings. Ceremonies culminate in a grand feast for members of the community, featuring the favorite dishes of the departed. Five shares of food are offered separately outside of the home for the feeding of the 1) r ̣s ̣is – seers, 2) devatas – deities, 3) ancestors, 4) animals, and 5) wandering spirits. After one year, the departed is memorialized and annually thereafter.

9  Memorialized spaces Pitṛpakṣa – the ‘feeding’ of the traveling dead The Hindu calendar allocates structural space for worship and offerings made on behalf of ancestors. pitr ̣paksa,̣ literally translating as the ‘fortnight of the ancestors,’ occurs once per year during September (lunar month of Bhadrapada), and is a sixteen-day period culminating in Navaratri, the nine-day Fall worship of the Goddess. For most Hindus in Trinidad, pitr ̣paks ̣a is a period entrenched with inauspiciousness because it is a season when departed and disembodied spirits roam freely in the earthly plane. Hindus refrain from engaging in auspicious occasions like marriage ceremonies, major business dealings, large purchases, and new beginnings. Aside from routine prayer, special rituals are not enjoined except for ancestor rites. During pitr ̣paksa,̣ tarpan, or water libations consisting of a mixture of rice and black sesame seeds, are offered during the morning hours. Ancestors who travel in their astral bodies ‘consume’ food and water through their sense of smell. Libations are offered on kuśa grass that is planted outside of homes, with its tip knotted. The knot has the power to tether the soul for the duration of their feasting. After feeding, the ancestors spend their time traveling until their next meal. A total of five daily offerings are made to rishis, maternal ancestors, paternal ancestors, animals, and wandering spirits. Practitioners report the offering of tarpan as a deeply personal way of connecting with their loved ones, one where the act itself transforms into a ‘meditation of remembrance.’ Dreams or visitations of one or several deceased relatives are regularly cited during pitr ̣paks ̣a. Based upon the nature of the dream or visitation, the assumption is that the soul is carrying a message or is in need of something that can only be satisfied through ritualized offerings from a surviving relative. At the end of pitr ̣paks ̣a the knot is released from the kuśa grass, as are the traveling ancestors. In the 1950s, Morton Klass reported that pitr ̣paks ̣a was ‘widely observed’ and ‘each family’ offered ‘food and prayer’ for their deceased relatives. He further noted that in villages, the offerings were an ‘entirely private’ affair reserved only for relatives (Klass, 1988: p. 178). Though annual feeding falls within the domestic category of Hindu rituals, it is transitioning to public spaces. In the last decade, Ravindranath Maharaj, the founder of the Hindu Kendra Prachar of Longdenville, Trinidad, initiated a communal approach to offerings during pitr ̣paksa.̣ Maharaj, known as ‘Raviji,’ has a history of seeking to ‘reinvigorate ritual by initiating informed and creative forms of Hindu worship’ (Richman, 2010: p. 94). Raviji states his design of a ‘community approach’ to pitr ̣paks ̣a is the ‘multiplying of a single act’ and is a mass event consisting of simultaneous tarpan offerings. Each year, rows of kuśa grass are planted on the grounds of the Kendra for 106

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their congregation and neighboring Hindu community to engage in libations. Inside the temple premises, tables are elaborately dressed with kuśa grass and black sesame seeds and adorned with photos of families’ departed loved ones with an oil-lamp reverentially place in front. The local custom has unintendedly become a festive occasion during a time that most regard as inauspicious. Families introduce community members to generations of their forefathers, and even prospective brides and grooms attend to ‘meet’ their soon to be in-laws through anecdotal stories and memories (R. N. Maharaj). The integration of neighboring Hindu communities of Longdenville has served to revitalize the observance of pitr ̣paks ̣a and infuse it with community spirit in an otherwise inauspicious time.

Gangadhara – sacralizing landscapes The Gangadhara festival of Trinidad is another occasion exhibiting a communal approach to honoring ancestors. Indigenous to this locality, Gangadhara centers on the worship of the deities Ganga and Shiva, and is celebrated annually for the last twenty-five years by hundreds of Hindu devotees who travel to the Marianne River in Blanchisseuse. The Marianne River that flows through the northern range of mountains is venerated as a local manifestation of the Ganges in India, and for the naturally occurring shivalinga it houses. As part of the day-long ceremonies, a public tarpan offering is enacted to pay obeisance to ancestors. During this ritual, devotees remember their indentured ancestors and commemorate their efforts in establishing Hinduism in the island and their sacralizing of the landscape. In the 2017 Gangadhara festival, Swami Prakashananda, of the Chinmaya Mission in Trinidad, lectured on the auspiciousness of the Trinidad ‘Ganga,’ revering it as not only as a ‘physical manifestation’ of God, but as waters that remove all impurities and as sustenance fostering the continuity of life. Pandita Geetaji describes Ganga as being intimately intertwined in life and death, as it is the Goddess who has the power to wash away the sins of the living.The pilgrims who journey to Gangadhara are met with a message that the same nature that is life-giving and life-sustaining, is also life-taking. Gangadhara, therefore, presents another socially demarcated space for Hindus to commune with their departed.

10 Dīvalī – lighting the path of the departed Dīvalī is yet another occasion within the Hindu religious calendar when ancestors are remembered. Trinidadians customarily light two lamps for the departed on the eve of Dīvalī. The lamp is locally referred to as jam kī dīya and bharat kī dīya.The first is lit for the fallen soldiers who died in Lanka in the mythical war between the deity Rama and demon Ravana. The second lamp is lit for the deceased in their ancestral home of India. In each case, the lamps are external signifiers of auspiciousness that light the path of the traveling souls. Moreover, this practice fortifies a distinctly Indo-Trinidadian identity by demonstrating a historical connection to India’s mythical past and remembrance of Trinidad’s transnational and nationalistic ties.

11 Conclusion The Hindu view of life and death is predicated upon the pursuit of freedom, enjoining dharma at every stage. For many Hindus, what happens after physical death is just as important as in life. Tensions that played out between Hindus and the state were a result of their being denied religious freedoms. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Hindu views on death were diametrically opposed to reigning Christian ideals. As Indians once occupied the lowest strata of society, it was not difficult for the state to inhibit their growing religious dimensions. 107

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The Hindu right to cremate, as a result of social movements dedicated to the defense and revival of Hinduism, was a monumental victory and testament to religion’s resilience in the diaspora. Legal practice of Hindu death rituals opened a particular socio-cultural space grounded in textual interpretations, religious performance, communal worship, and innovative local customs. This movement can also be defined as a living narrative because it continues to evolve through initiatives that localize customs in the Trinidadian context. The examination of death rituals within Trinidadian Hinduism illuminates an important narrative of persistence, of which innovating and uniquely Trinidadian traditions emerged. Key words: Trinidad, Trinidadian mourning practices, Hindu death, burial, mortuary practices, Antyes ̣tị Saṃskāra

Notes 1 The Rāmcaritmānas was authored by the saint-poet Tulsidas in the sixteenth century and is a retelling of the epic story, the Rāmāyaṇa. The Rāmcaritmānas was brought to Trinidad by Indian indentured laborers and is the most popular text of Trinidadian Hinduism. It has played an authorizing role in the development of religio-cultural traditions and identity, and Indian politics in Trinidad. 2 The Garudạ purān ̣a is one of the eighteen major Purāṇas (a genre of Hindu texts) and is dated as early as the first millennium ce. 3 Bhojpuri is a North Indian dialect of Hindi. 4 The caste system of Trinidad underwent immense modifications as many castes have been subsumed into one general group, with the exception of Brahmins. Brahmin priests play many roles including that of a ‘God-father,’ counselor, ritual specialist, and public lecturer. 5 The Arya Samaj was established in 1875 by Dayananda Saraswati as a return to Vedic thought. It was originally transplanted in Trinidad by Indian missionaries and is formally organized as the Arya Pratinidhi Sabha of Trinidad and the Vedic Mission of Trinidad. The Samaj operates in distinction from Brahmanical-Sanatan Hinduism. 6 In Indian religions, the Upanishads are an important body of philosophical texts. 7 The Pret Manjari is widely referenced among Trinidadian Hindu pandits, and is a procedural text of the ceremonies that take place on the eleventh and twelfth day after death.

Further reading Sayers, M. R. (2013) Feeding the Dead: Ancestor Worship in Ancient India. Oxford University Press. Matthew R. Sayers traces the early history of ancestor worship in South Asia from the Vedic to the classical period, elaborating on Hindu death rituals. Parry, J. P. (1994) Death in Banaras. Cambridge University Press. Jonathan P. Parry contextualizes death in the sacred city of Banaras, and explores in detail cremation rituals and the roles of priests and laity. Vertovec, S. (1992) Hindu Trinidad: Religion, Ethnicity and Socio-economic Change. Macmillan Academic and Professional. Steven Vertovec, a prominent scholar of the Hindu diaspora, presents a historical and anthropological study of the development of Hinduism in Trinidad.

Bibliography Adesh, H. S. (2006) Aaj Kaa Pataa hai Mujhe: Selected Songs of Devotion & Dispassion. Trinidad  & Tobago: Shree Adesh Ashram. Behl, A. and Rawat, L. (Trans.) (Undated print). Bhajan Mala a Golden Treasury of Popular Bhajans. New Delhi: B.B. International. Brereton, B. (1981) A History of Modern Trinidad, 1783–1962. Kingston, Jamaica; Exeter, NH: Heinemann.

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Politics of death in Trinidadian Hinduism Cremation Act 1953, updated 2015 (c.30:51) Trinidad and Tobago: Ministry of the Attorney General and Legal Affairs. Available at: http://rgd.legalaffairs.gov.tt/laws2/alphabetical_list/lawspdfs/30.51.pdf. Flood, G. (1996) An Introduction to Hinduism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gosine, M. (1986) East Indians and Black Power in the Caribbean: The Case of Trinidad. New York: Africana Research Publications. Kane, P.V. (1953) History of Dharmasastra Part IV. Poona: Government Oriental Series. Klass, M. (1988) East Indians in Trinidad: A Study of Cultural Persistence. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Klass, M. (1991) Singing with Sai Baba:The Politics of Revitalization in Trinidad. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Maharaj, P. (June 5, 2017) Interview with P. Ramlakhan. Siparia, Trinidad. Maharaj, R. (May 16, 2017) Interview with P. Ramlakhan. Orlando, Florida. Maharaj, R. N. (March 14, 2017; June 4, 2017) Interview with P. Ramlakhan. Orlando, Florida; Blanchisseuse, Trinidad. Maharaj, S. (2015) ‘Open Pyre Cremation,’ Trinidad and Tobago Guardian [online], May 7. Available at: www. guardian.co.tt/columnist/2015-05-07/open-pyre-cremation. Maharaj, S. (June 3, 2017) Interview with P. Ramlakhan. Port Fortin, Trinidad. Monier-Williams, M. (2008) Sanskrit-English Dictionary. Recomposed and Improved Edition. New Delhi: Parimal Publications. Myers, H. (1993) ‘East Indian, and West Indian Music in Felicity, Trinidad,’ in: Blum, S., Bohlman, P. V. and Neuman, D. M. (eds). Ethnomusicology and Modern Music History. Chicago: University of Illinois, pp. 231–224. Narayanan, V. (2012) ‘Ritual Food,’ in: Jacobsen, K. A., Basu, H., Malinar, A. and Narayanan, V. (eds). Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism Online. Leiden: Brill. Parry, J. P. (1994) Death in Banaras. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Persad, H. (2016) What You Need to Know about Hindu Death Ceremonies. Trinidad: Swaha International. Rampersad, I. (2014) ‘Hinduism in the Caribbean,’ in: Kumar, P. P. (ed). Contemporary Hinduism. Bristol, CT: Acumen Publishing Limited. Rampersad, I. (April 15, 2017) Interview with P. Ramlakhan. Orlando, Florida. Ramsingh, G. (June 7, 2017) Interview with P. Ramlakhan. Longdenville, Trinidad. Richman, P. (2010) ‘We Don’t Change It, We Make It Applicable’: Ramlila in Trinidad. TDR: The Drama Review, 54(1), 76–105. Sayers, M. R. (2013) Feeding the Dead: Ancestor Worship in Ancient India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Singh, S. A. (2005) ‘Hinduism and the State in Trinidad’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 6(3), pp. 353–365. Singh, S. A. (2010) ‘The Ramayana in Trinidad: A Socio-historical Perspective,’ The Journal of Caribbean History, 44(2), pp. 201–223. Singh, S.-A. (2012) The Ramayana Tradition and Socio-religious Change in Trinidad, 1917–1990. Kingston: Ian Randle. Smith, B. (2000) ‘Hinduism,’ in: Neusner, J. (ed). Death and the Afterlife. Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, pp. 97–115. Vertovec, S. (1992) Hindu Trinidad: Religion, Ethnicity and Socio-economic Change. London: Macmillan Academic. Younger, P. (2010) New Homelands: Hindu Communities in Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad, South Africa, Fiji, and East Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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10 THE RIGHT TO BE DEAD Designing Future Cemeteries Jakob Borrits Sabra and John Troyer

1  Introduction: the Future Cemetery Project, a (brief) history The Future Cemetery (FC) story begins in April 2012 as a three-way collaboration between the Centre for Death and Society (CDAS) at the University of Bath,1 Calling the Shots Creative Media (CTS) in Bristol, 2 England, and Arnos Vale Cemetery (AVC),3 also in Bristol. The project initially came together as a proposal for a newly launched program based at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol called REACT (Research and Enterprise in Arts and Creative Technology)4 that wanted to fund projects focused on ‘heritage.’ The funding was part of a large UK Government Arts and Humanities Research Council funding stream. Each team was responsible for defining how its project worked with heritage as well as what the term heritage meant in practice. All three project partners continue to work together today as the Future Cemetery design team. The original 2012 Future Cemetery proposal presented the following design challenge: How can death studies academics and creative technologists collaborate with a 175-year-old working Victorian era cemetery in order to encourage visitors to think about end of life planning? The team summed up the design challenge this way: We all know death is in the future, we just want to make the future more visible.The Future Cemetery proposal also highlighted how the future of the past played an important role in heritage cemetery designs that, in Michel de Certeau’s terms, forced ‘the silent body to speak’ (De Certeau, 1988: p. 3). After three years of collaborative projects and development, in November 2015, the Future Cemetery launched its own Grand Design Challenge,5 Future Dead: Designing Disposal for both Dead Bodies and Digital Data using the following guidelines: • • • • • •

How can the concept and practice of ‘Disposal’ be understood to encompass the organic and the inorganic, the physical and the digital? How might relations between the body, the person, and digital memories be unfolded, intertwined, separated, or combined? Should disposal of the body be followed by disposal of remnant digital interactions? Does the right to be dead also mean the right to be forgotten? What role can Future Cemeteries play in managing new disposal possibilities and realities? How can these points be addressed within Arnos Vale Cemetery’s Strategic Challenges?6 110

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This chapter critically reflects on the Future Cemetery’s design projects and its innovative relationship with Arnos Vale Cemetery in order to expand on the FC’s contribution to how other cemeteries can use mortality in design to create new kinds of death spaces. In this way we share Marita Sturken’s interests in ‘technologies of memory’ for commemorative sites (1997: p. 9).

2  Arnos Vale Cemetery What makes the entire Future Cemetery Project possible is Arnos Vale Cemetery’s rich history and presence in Bristol. AVC was originally commissioned in 1837–1840 by the Bristol General Cemetery Company as a privately owned cemetery. It was designed by architect Charles Underwood to resemble the picturesque landscapes of Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, London’s various Victorian cemeteries, and the ancient Greek’s necropolis (Lambton, 2007). Today AVC’s 45-acre cemetery estate is owned by the Bristol City Council and maintained by a non-profit charity trust, the Arnos Vale Cemetery Trust (AVCT), to preserve its heritage, buildings, monuments, and wildlife biotopes as well as operate and manage funeral services. The cemetery holds approximately 50,000 graves and monuments, but a total of 300,000 individuals are located at the site through additional cremated remains internments. In the 1980s, due to a scarcity of excess burial space, revenue from funerary services dramatically slowed down, forcing the cemetery’s then private owners to close the cemetery gates. Rumors of property development on the site stirred up local protests and caused the establishment of a Friends Community that favored preserving the cemetery grounds as a site of public heritage. In 2001 the voluntary work of the Friends Community, together with local and national political campaigning, led the Bristol City Council to force the private owner into selling AVC to the city for one British pound (£1.00). Arnos Vale Cemetery Trust was then simultaneously formed, and in 2003, after resolving legal issues of property ownership, Arnos Vale left private hands and entered into municipal, public ownership. In 2005, the trust was awarded £4.8 million in funding from the UK’s Heritage Lottery Fund to restore the cemetery, manage and sustain its unique landscape and plants and natural life, and develop an educational program to promote the history of the site. In 2010 after the restoration project was completed AVC reopened to the public, offering a wide range of services and events as part of its new strategy for the future sustainable survival of the cemetery. Part of this strategy involved setting up a trading subsidiary, Arnos Vale Cemetery Enterprises Ltd, through which income is generated from enterprises such as the on-site Atrium Cafe, the Arnos Vale Gift Shop, venue hire, and weddings. In 2012 AVC Trust signed a 125-year-lease for the entire site, which made the cemetery’s longterm, sustainable design plans for both funerary services and heritage dissemination an optimal location for the establishment of the Future Cemetery Project.

3  2012 Future Cemetery pilot project The Future Cemetery’s initial 2012 project focused on re-thinking how a cemetery space filled with historical importance but also still open as a working cemetery could use new kinds of ‘creative technology.’ An initial impulse was to create a cemetery app that visitors downloaded on their phones or devices. Apps loomed large in 2012 Heritage sector discourse and initially made sense for AVC, but the core team quickly realized that many cemetery visitors didn’t have a phone or device that could use an app, and, more importantly, didn’t want to stare at their phones in the cemetery. Another key issue that faced many cemeteries at the time (less so now) is that signal coverage varied widely and might often mean that a phone wouldn’t work. Many Arnos Vale Cemetery visitors also preferred paper maps and fold-out guides, which they knew 111

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how to use, didn’t require power supplies, and could be easily referenced.7 The project team made a further, early conceptual and practical design choice, which was to front-load everything the Future Cemetery created with questions/ideas about a person’s own death as opposed to tagging those points onto the end of something. So, instead of concluding any design with a question about being an organ donor (for example), every activity started with a question about an individual’s death and their end of life plans. In April to June 2012 the Future Cemetery Project brought researchers, creative technologists, and heritage organizations together to experiment with multiple technologies that encouraged audiences to engage in new ways with issues of death and dying. The idea was to deliver a large-scale project that experimented with new approaches, e.g. daytime video projection, live actors, augmented reality, and Bluetooth soundscapes that engaged visitors with the stunning but sensitive space of Arnos Vale Cemetery. Being a cemetery, Arnos Vale was and still is a vast historical repository of human technology, a ‘deathscape’ of innovation that stretches all the way back to the gravestone (Maddrell and Sidaway, 2010). The pilot project described in this chapter used Arnos Vale as a platform for experimentation combining digital technologies with original creative story writing to bring stories to life in the cemetery.The specific research aim was to test the effectiveness of new technologies and how creative writing processes, live performance, and user participation through guided tours work as modes of interpretations within the site. The initial 2012 project concluded in June of that year, when a series of interactive technology events and cemetery-based performances about death and dying were presented.8 What finally emerged from the 2012 experiments and designs was a new longer term project for the entire ‘Future Cemetery’ concept. Instead of designing new ways of thinking about death only for Arnos Vale Cemetery, the Future Cemetery would become a design hub that used Arnos Vale as a testing ground and open air R&D space for all interested cemeteries. By doing this, the Future Cemetery could design and problem solve for cemeteries anywhere on the planet. The 2015 Design Challenge was the first step in that direction. The testing ground wouldn’t be limited to graves and burial use, however, as it would also look at dead body disposal technologies, sustainability issues, and long-term digital infrastructures.What made and makes the testing ground concept so innovative is that the Future Cemetery will take on design questions for other cemeteries in order to find the strongest solution. The Future Cemetery is committed to making the future of death more visible however a given death space defines it. Individuals who attended the pilot project event were asked to complete a questionnaire to assess the user experience and the particular performances and technologies.The responses from participants were overwhelmingly positive and suggested that people were very willing to engage with the subject matter of death and the sensitivities around bereavement and remembrance. One visitor comment, in particular, summed up this sentiment: Most people do not think about what is going to happen to them when they die, or what is going to happen to their loved ones when they die, until it happens, and then it is too late to say what is precious and what is important.9 The pilot project generated much public attention and from an academic perspective opened up the idea of making AVC into a permanent research lab. By working with the heritage sector, cemeteries, creative partners, and academic institutions, the Future Cemetery is able to prototype, develop, and demonstrate what can be done at cemeteries in terms of art, technology, and engagement with death, disposal, and remembrance.

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4  Death infrastructures and temporality A key issue for the Future Cemetery is thinking through and critically engaging with what Centre for Death and Society Director John Troyer calls ‘Death Infrastructures.’ The concept of death infrastructure encompasses the sum total of ways that human mortality is managed and dead bodies are removed after the moment of death. These infrastructures are important in order to prevent dead bodies from accumulating in spaces they normally don’t occupy, e.g. city streets. Only when dead bodies start showing up where they don’t normally belong, do people recognize a problem or breakdown in this infrastructure. The Future Cemetery is committed to theorizing and designing these kind of long-term infrastructure plans. A core reason for this commitment comes from Arnos Vale Cemetery’s own 125-year lease with the City of Bristol. This multi-generational timeframe opens up the possibility of asking: What is a 125-year infrastructure and sustainability plan for a cemetery? The contemporary history of creating, planning, and supporting long-term, multigenerational first world death infrastructures is riddled with design choices. So, for example, the emergence of the railway system in the United States created a transportation infrastructure that was then adopted and modified for the transport of dead human bodies (Troyer, 2007). Where the living migrate, so too will the dead. The railway is but one example and others certainly emerge: the telegraph and electronic communication, phone lines, and modern crematoria equipment. What is important about most death infrastructure examples is that while none of them were purposely built for the dead (setting aside crematoria) their connection to the living is then extended to the dead. In this way, human interaction with most technological innovations, especially communication technologies, creates an infrastructure of communication both before and after death. The recent attention paid towards different forms of postmortem social media usage online and through digital computers often misses ‘older’ records of lived lives: cassette tape messages, voice-mail recordings, and even pre-web e-mail correspondence (Graham and Montoya, 2015). The cumulative effect of these human interactions through different technological means supports the larger communication network used by the living to remember the dead. What the Future Cemetery is currently pursuing is how to use design to then blend together these seemingly disparate infrastructures: disposal, digital information, memory, and memorialization. The goal is to understand how the current cemetery model already supports these infrastructures while also then creating possibilities for the future. By simultaneously examining and then also designing how these different areas can work together, the Future Cemetery is creating a new kind of cemetery infrastructure. This new infrastructure will take the older issue of body disposal and then also incorporate digital information storage/disposal in order to build a new location for memory storage. The long-term need for sustainable infrastructure designs is clearly visible in the final disposition of first world bodies. More and more individuals and companies are starting to look at how sustainable disposal practices can be used to reduce the dead body’s impact on the environment. The concept of ‘greener’ disposition practices isn’t new, but it is an idea that brings many possible changes to the disposal infrastructures.The Future Cemetery has begun looking at how alongside these innovations in disposal infrastructure, other overlapping infrastructures might come into play. As stated in the 2015 Design Competition challenge, the goal of designing new body disposal systems alongside digital data disposal focuses attention on two current death dilemmas: how to make dead body disposal more sustainable while simultaneously dealing with postmortem digital data.

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The current problem of postmortem digital data infrastructure largely focuses on retrieval while the in-use systems remain accessible. The Future Cemetery has always pondered the accessibility issue but with a twist. Perhaps the point is not to always guarantee access (that’s not difficult given how quickly systems change) but instead guarantee a system for people to destroy their digital data. Perhaps the issue of control is less about permanent access and more about the ability to permanently cull online information. The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in 2014 that individuals have a right to be forgotten online, so the Future Cemetery is pursuing the idea that a person also has a right to be permanently dead online.10 The key issue to explore is what digital ‘permanence’ means but also doesn’t mean. Most infrastructure designs inevitably fail or are replaced, so permanence is another long-term issue.Yet the persistence of disposal infrastructure systems illustrates how phenomena such as human death can create possibilities for new designs. How this all links up and creates a new kind of infrastructure is part of the larger Future Cemetery design ethos and Grand Challenge design competition. The goal is an infrastructure system that handles multi-generational requirements as a 125-year commitment. Built into that 125-year system, of course, is an understanding that everything it does for both dead bodies and digital information will radically change, several times, over the course of a century.

5  The 2015 Future Cemetery design competition Future dead: designing disposal for both dead bodies and digital data11 The 2015 Future Cemetery Design Competition required that designers respond to current challenges surrounding death, dying, and disposal. The FC team specifically located the competition in Arnos Vale Cemetery due to AVC’s position as an exemplar of innovative and creative Historic Working Cemeteries that focuses on long-term, sustainable development. Arnos Vale Cemetery also has a large, currently unused land area called the ‘Old Orchard’ that is being transformed into a long-term sustainable burial ground and is an ideal space for design experimentation and innovation. The competition’s theme of ‘disposal of human remains’ was extended beyond the purely corporeal to the increasingly digital and virtual remnants of a human life, and its implications both for us as individuals and families and, increasingly, for the business of dying. The Design Competition asked entrants to imagine a world where both human remains and a person’s digital footprint would be considered at the end of life.12 The design brief also encouraged entrants to engage in visionary and provocative proposals that linked to real world practices that cemeteries could use to sustain themselves and have continued relevance and meaning in a society marked by rapid social and technological change. Thirty-one total application packages were electronically dispatched after being requested, of which nine proposals were received by the deadline. The teams represented architects, researchers, social workers, artists, and interactive designers from Denmark, the United Kingdom, China, Indonesia, the United States, Germany, Russia, and Israel.The proposals collectively used innovative design objects, multiple disposal technologies, virtual digital memorial platforms and mediated urban and architectural spaces that emphasized playful and social remembrance strategies. The Future Cemetery team was looking for designs that fell into these four areas: innovation in management of heritage and urban green spaces; creative exploration of the cultural and social aspects of end of life and death; innovation in memorialization; and innovation in the process of disposal (Consultancy, 2014). The proposals were further evaluated on their level of uniqueness, innovation, and provocative interpretation of the challenge. Most important was the conceptual engagement with the future of cemeteries in terms of space, time, and place, and 114

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direct engagement with the local context of Arnos Vale Cemetery, its strategic challenges, the AVC Trust’s objectives of sustainability and management as well as the feasibility of the idea, in terms of prototyping, technological development, and economic realization (Arnos Vale Cemetery Trust, 2014). Two shortlisted proposals were found to fulfil this design aim.

6  Shortlisted proposals13 The Dust2Seed proposal by Audrey Samson offered poetic and innovative solutions to Arnos Vale’s challenges in the physical/digital world.14 The concept incorporated digital data into existing corporeal funeral rituals, either by erasure, memorialization, or by growing it into something new. Dust2Seed suggested two alternative options for memorializing a person’s data. The first was a service where all digital data were downloaded onto a memory stick, before being deleted or memorialized on a relevant online platform, e.g. Facebook. The material memory stick would then be encased in resin for safekeeping or handed out among bereaved relatives as wearable jewelry, a material memento, or secular relic. The second option transferred the downloaded digital data onto a ‘data seedling’ to be grafted onto an existing tree, a ‘remembrance tree,’ in the Old Orchard at Arnos Vale Cemetery (see Figure 10.1). This procedure would encode the person’s digital data into a DNA code that would be used to synthesize real DNA and then coupled with a seedling’s genome. The grafting of data seedlings approach would encourage cremations and woodland burial forms, and reduce the amount of required burial space associated with Arnos Vale. It was designed to respect the existing cemetery infrastructure and animate AVC’s Old Orchard with new activities, as the grafting of data seedlings onto trees would become a recurring memorialization form. The proposal could adapt to the changing needs of the AVC Trust and also answer the emerging data desire to both the right to be forgotten and the right to be dead.

Figure 10.1  The Dust2Seed proposal: digital data and data seedling remembrance trees. (Audrey Samson)

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Dust2Seed’s combination of cremation/woodland burial bodily disposal with the option of handling personal digital data by transplanting it into the natural woodland landscape of Arnos Vale was a unique design solution. The Future Cemetery team had concerns regarding the state of development of the technologies imagined for the harvesting, memorialization, encasing, and transplanting of the digital data into DNA as well as the feasibility of the financial model of selling this memorialization method. Working with genealogy as a way to represent relatives by grafting seedlings onto ‘family trees’ was a thought-provoking step for the increasingly popular tradition of woodland burials.

7  Sylvan Constellation The Sylvan Constellation proposal by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) DeathLAB + LATENT Productions, and architect Karla Rothstein offered an ecologically beneficial infrastructure for human body and data disposal in the Old Orchard space.15 With the imperative of re-tooling existing resource-intensive funerary practices, e.g. cremation and casket burial, 150 anaerobic biomass memorial vessels, containing corpses in accelerated biological decomposition, would help shape the social and environmental understandings of the body’s connection to earthen burial, death, and remembrance. The memorial vessels would be designed to harness the energy from the process of microbial methanogenesis to illuminate cemetery pathways and generate a perpetual landscape constellation honoring the deceased (see Figure 10.2).

Figure 10.2 The Sylvan Constellation proposal: an ecologically beneficial infrastructure. (DeathLAB at Columbia University)

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The proposal met the logistical and economic challenges of long-term burial. It also supported the preservation of Arnos Vale’s flora and fauna, as the biomass from bodies would contain nutrients to support the natural ecology of the Old Orchard and surrounding areas. Technologically speaking, the project engages with available technology, developed at Columbia University, and would therefore be realizable when properly funded. One long-term design question under development specifically asks how the energy would be tapped and for how long the illumination would last. The proposal also takes on board sensitivity to the public perception of this (or any) new method of final disposition, since the cemetery would be harnessing power from the decomposing bodies of dead citizens. Digital data connected to the deceased would then also gradually disappear until gone as the individual’s dead body decomposed in the memorial vessel. Sylvan Constellation was judged to have the potential to make something new and energy sustainable from bodily remains while also ecologically disposing of digital footprints. The connection with DeathLAB, an established and respected research group, was also important for both Arnos Vale and the Future Cemetery.

8  The winning proposal: Sylvan Constellation The Future Cemetery team selected Sylvan Constellation as the winning proposal. It was clear that this design project would greatly benefit Arnos Vale Cemetery and that the DeathLAB’s exploration of dead body and digital data disposal would be useful for many other death spaces. Sylvan Constellation expressed a unique sensitivity and emotional understanding of the contemporary societal issues surrounding death and dying. The project displayed a profound connection with real world issues, which was an important parameter to consider if the project was to get support from Arnos Vale’s many communities. The provocative concept of using biomass disposal technology for dead human bodies was thoughtfully countered by the project’s aesthetic, atmospheric, and spiritual sensitivity towards bereavement and remembrance. DeathLAB was awarded £5,000 British pounds for winning the design competition, and a Summer 2015 Residency to prototype and R&D the design in Arnos Vale Cemetery’s Old Orchard space. Further details about both the Sylvan Constellation design and installation will be published by the Future Cemetery team in due course.16

9  Conclusion and future perspectives At its core, the Future Cemetery is committed to designing multi-use facilities that combine numerous forms of disposal (cremation, burial, water based systems) alongside long-term data storage and disposal facilities. This new kind of infrastructure, specifically built around the dead in cemeteries, is a key step in designing whole new systems that emphasize how the cemetery space holds not only the dead body but also the digital memories of the deceased. As the first world and the developing world become more digitally encumbered, so too will human lives and legacies. The future funeral industry is beginning to see the economic potential in helping the dying and the bereaved decide what they want done with their digital data after lived mortality runs its course. Alongside the ‘right to be forgotten’ we also see the emergence of companies that naively guarantee ‘eternal remembrance’ based on the promise of a futuristic digitally simulated personhood.17 At a certain point the current digital infrastructures will most certainly break down and/or simply become unusable. The Future Cemetery anticipates this not-toodistant future by simply suggesting that the ‘right to be dead’ means expanding final disposition to include all aspects of human lives. 117

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In this way, the Future Cemetery focuses on mortality design and disposal that is a multimodal and multi-dimensional interface, where visitors and users can navigate the past in the future.The ‘Future Cemetery’ is a hybrid creation, a real physical space connected to the etherlike digitized narratives of remembrance. It also archives life and death in order to educate and engage with the public and support our social understanding of past and present death cultures. Today’s cemeteries often offer visitors complex multisensory experiences through combinations of sound, vision, touch, smell, and taste. Here temporality is represented through seasonal change, the ‘cycle-of-life’ through nature and wildlife, and the contributions of the deceased. In sum, a plethora of different experiences depending on time of day and random chance. The ‘eternally remembered’ digital memorial site or platform now only offers stimuli of two senses: sound and vision.18 The Future Cemetery believes that over the next 125-year timespan, most humans will still prefer physical cemetery sites to digital memorialization platforms (Sabra, 2015). Yet, instead of maintaining the popularly dualistic view often separating the material and the digital, the Future Cemetery argues that the two will become entangled through heretoforeunknown death infrastructures that can and should reside in purposely designed spaces of the dead. Cemetery visitors all know death is in the future.The Future Cemetery just wants to make that inevitable, personal future inescapably visible. Key words: cemetery, burial, cremation, Bristol, death technology, death data, Future Cemeteries

Notes 1 See www.bath.ac.uk/cdas (Accessed 1 June 2016). 2 See www.callingtheshots.co.uk (Accessed 1 June 2016). 3 See www.arnosvale.org.uk (Accessed 1 June 2016). 4 See www.react-hub.org.uk (Accessed 1 June 2016). 5 See www.futurecemetery.org (Accessed 1 June 2016). 6 AVC’s strategic challenges are: 1) increasing lack of available burial space, 2) cultural shift to cremation, 3) short lease burial options and restrictions on removal of remains/reuse of grave plots, 4) public perception of AVC as a closed and non-operative cemetery, 5) no way to charge admission fee from visitors, 6) limitation of current buildings and infrastructure due to heritage, and 7) conflicting views within Arnos Vale organization and voluntary communities. 7 Sabra, Andersen and Rodil’s (2015) more recent studies on cultural heritage strategies at public historic cemeteries in Denmark support the issues mentioned here and overall smartphone apps were only found promising in heritage interpretation programs targeting tourist audiences, not regular users or the bereaved. 8 Highlights from the 2012 event are viewable here: www.react-hub.org.uk/projects/heritage/futurecemetery (Accessed 1 June 2016). 9 This visitor comment from the 2012 Future Cemetery Evaluations points at a common challenge for any death design project, that conversations about death are perceived as an inappropriate conversational topic. This is supported in the 2015/2016 visitor survey (n=1408) at Bristol Museum’s Death: The Human Experience exhibition, where the FC found 75% of the visitors perceived discussing death and dying inappropriate or socially taboo even though the same respondents wanted to eagerly discuss death and dying. 10 For more information on the case, Google Spain and Inc v. Agencia Española De Protección De Datos (Aepd) And Mario Costeja González C-131/12, see www.ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/files/ factsheets/factsheet_data_protection_en.pdf (Accessed 1 June 2016). 11 The 2015 FC Design Challenge took inspiration from recent death design challenges sponsored by the international design and architecture website DesignBoom.

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The right to be dead 12 The Design Competition was launched alongside a REACT exhibition called The Rooms Festival that featured the Future Cemetery’s work. www.theroomsfestival.com (Accessed 1 June 2016). 13 The proposals were shortlisted by representatives of the Future Cemetery and its collaborators: Dr. John Troyer, Centre for Death and Society; Jeremy Routledge, Calling The Shots; Jo Landsdowne, REACT and Pervasive Media Studio; Claire Reddington, REACT and Pervasive Media Studio; Mike Coe and Janine Marriott, Arnos Vale Cemetery Trust; and Jakob Sabra, Aalborg University. 14 More about Audrey Samson here: www.ideacritik.com (Accessed 1 June 2016). 15 More about DeathLAB here: www.deathlab.org/about/ (Accessed 1 June 2016). 16 See www.futurecemetery.org for updates (Accessed 1 June 2016). 17 BBC3’s Rest In Pixels is a 2016 documentary that explores ‘life after digital death’ and digitally simulated interactions with representations of personhood. www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/item/085010aa-dfb2479d-8153-e893fbaff75b (Accessed 1 June 2016). 18 The postmortem digital simulation industry is currently represented by companies DeadSocial (www. deadsocial.org), LifeNaut (www.lifenaut.com), EterniMe (www.eterni.me), Eter9 (www.eter9.com), and Humai (www.humaitech.com) (all sites Accessed 1 June 2016).

Further reading Bachelard, G. (1994) The Poetics of Space. Translated by M. Jolas. Boston: Beacon Hill Press. Discussing poetry, art, and philosophy, Bachelard explores domestic living spaces and the ways that they both embody and shape our ideas, memories, and wishes. Danto, A. (1985) ‘The Vietnam Veterans Memorial,’ The Nation, August 31. An artistic examination of memorials in general, and the Vietnam memorial in particular. Forster, K. (1982) ‘Monument/Memory and the Mortality of Architecture,’ Oppositions, 25, pp. 2–19. An examination of the architectural construction of monuments. Forty, A. and Küchler, S. (eds). (2001) The Art of Forgetting. New York: Berg. An examination of the ways that monuments shape collective memory. Riegl, A. (1982) ‘The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin,’ Translated by K. W. Forster and D. Ghirardo, Oppositions, 25, pp. 21–51. An exploration of the modern use of monuments.

Bibliography Arnos Vale Cemetery Trust (2014) ‘Financial Statements Year Ended 31 March 2013,’ Bristol. Consultancy, A. E. (2014) ‘Future Cemetery: Future Plan 2014–2018,’ Bristol. Danto, A. (1985) ‘The Vietnam Veterans Memorial,’ The Nation, 31 August. De Certeau, M. (1986) Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Translated by B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. De Certeau, M. (1988) The Writing of History. Translated by T. Conley. New York: Columbia University Press. Forty, A. and Küchler, S. (eds). (2001) The Art of Forgetting. New York: Berg. Graham, C. and Montoya, A. (eds). (2015) ‘Death, Memory and the Human in the Internet Era,’ Mortality Special Issue, 20(4). Lambton, L. (2007) Arnos Vale Bristol: A Victorian Cemetery. Bristol: Redcliffe Press. Libeskind, D. (2000) The Space of Encounter. New York: Universe Publishing. Maddrell, A. and Sidaway, J. D. (eds). (2010) Deathscapes: Spaces for Death, Mourning and Remembrance. London: Ashgate Publishing. Riegl, A. (1985) ‘The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin,’Translated by K.W. Forster and D. Ghirardo, Oppositions, 25, pp. 21–51. Sabra, J. B. (2015) ‘Den Digitale Kirkegårdskultur: Hvordan Sociale Medier Forstærker Gravminderne’ [The Digital Cemetery Culture: How Social Media Enhance Memorialisation], Kirkegaardskultur [Cemetery Culture], 1: pp. 88–106.

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Jakob Borrits Sabra and John Troyer Sabra, J. B., Andersen, H. J. and Rodil, K. (2015) ‘Hybrid Cemetery Culture: Making Death Matter in Cultural Heritage Using Smart Mobile Technologies,’ in: 2015 International Conference on Culture and Computing (Culture Computing). Danvers, MA: The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, pp. 167–174. Sturken, M. (1997) Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press. Troyer, J. (2007) ‘Embalmed Vision,’ Mortality, 12(1), pp. 22–47.

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PART III

Representations of death Narratives and rhetoric

11 POST MORTEM (2010) Saint Salvador Allende and historical autopsy Moisés Park

1 Introduction On September 11, 1973, after the Chilean coup, the remains of the then president of Chile, Salvador Allende (1908–1973), were transferred from the presidential building, Palacio de la Moneda, to the military hospital where it was concluded that he committed suicide. Allende’s body was found at his presidential office, minutes after two aircrafts bombed La Moneda. Photos of the corpse near his desk were quickly disclosed in printed media, and few doubted that he died in the building. The details of the autopsy remained in the archives of the military hospital until 1990. The body was buried in a clandestine manner in Viña del Mar, but exhumed during Chile’s return to democracy in 1990 after General Augusto Pinochet (1915–2006) was no longer in power. Soon thereafter, in Santiago, Allende received honors for any Chilean head of state under the presidency of Patricio Aylwin, the first democratically elected president since 1970 (Célis, 2011). Rumors that Allende was murdered abounded in some circles of ex-militants and sympathizers during the dictatorship. Even when witnesses and medical examinations concluded that he shot himself, skeptics challenged the cause of death. A 2011 court order reopened the case in order to verify the details of his death. Although some insisted that substantial evidence pointed to the possibility of murder, the final conclusion upheld assumptions that Allende committed suicide. On December 10, 2006, General Augusto Pinochet died in the military hospital in the capital. On one hand, protesters who supported him declared that unlike Allende, Pinochet did not commit suicide, suggesting that his death was more honorable. On the other hand, as indicated by Michael Lazzara and Vicky Unruh, divided Chileans were talking about Pinochet’s ‘remains that were disintegrating’ with anguish or ‘passionate’ fury (2009: p. 1). There is no doubt that the deaths of these two historical figures caused ideological and physical confrontations in public spheres. Social media spread the images of both corpses, forcing citizens and readers to cope with these ‘ruins’ that could signal a dead corpse and a political ideology. The image of Allende’s corpse in La Moneda served as evidence of a defeated ideological power, perhaps recalling the monochromatic images of the bloody and lifeless body of Che Guevara which circulated in 1967 to demonstrate that the revolution in South America came to an abrupt end.

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The widely distributed image of Pinochet’s transparent casket became a sensational image that once again provoked reverence or furor. Taking into account the inevitable national impact of the representation of the body postmortem on mass and social media, it is of the utmost importance to reflect on these corporal and ideological ‘ruins.’ Without a doubt, documentary films by Patricio Guzmán (1941–) generated a nostalgic reflection on the revolutionary years in Chile with a considerable emphasis of the role of Allende in the Unidad Popular Alliance in the ’60s and ’70s.1 His documentary Salvador Allende (2004) opens with a close-up shot of the metonymic iconography of Allende’s broken glasses, the only physical (extension of his) ‘remains’ that the director uses to later feature his most personal and subjective documentary. The film is a prelude (along with Machuca [2004] by Andrés Wood) to what would be a new wave of artistic and academic interest in the coup; and as a backdrop, the figure of Allende.2 This chapter focuses on a critical analysis of Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s Post Mortem (2010) with an emphasis on the mise-en-scène that recreates the 1973 autopsy. I propose an alternative application of ‘historical autopsy’ and while tracing how Larraín’s work demystifies Allende’s figure, a critical reading ultimately heightens the paradox surrounding the president’s body as ideologically sacrilegious and affectively auratic. The film’s protagonist, Mario, works as a transcriber for the thanatologist Dr. Castillo, with his assistant, Sandra. Mario spends afternoons visiting dance shows in downtown Santiago where he meets one of the dancers, Nancy. However, she has a young lover (Victor) with whom she usually spends afternoons in the houses of Allende supporters. After the coup,Victor and Nancy hide from the military. Mario offers them refuge in a tiny room behind his house, along with some food; but ultimately plans to punish them by locking them in and starving them to death. Though Larraín’s film was controversial, it did not receive massive pushback even as plans to recreate such a polemical moment in recent history became public after his previous film, Tony Manero (2008). Tony Manero was Larraín’s first feature film that explicitly dealt with Chile under Pinochet’s regime. The film received several awards and wide recognition among national and international critics.3 The success of Tony Manero fueled the anticipation that helped the production and distribution of Post Mortem. Members of the audience and critics were eager to watch the second installment of what became part of an ‘accidental trilogy’ on the Chilean dictatorship.4 Until then, very few feature films with fictional plots successfully dealt with the theme of the Chilean dictatorship so explicitly.5 Unquestionably, the dictatorship and the desaparecidos are central themes in many documentaries6 and a few feature films before a recent boom. Fictional narratives ‘based on a true story,’ however, largely avoided the theme or relegated it to feature films with modest massive commercial aspirations. The plot of Post Mortem works as an excuse for the recreation of the autopsy, a morbid and scandalous act for many Allende supporters; but at the same time, an opportunity to delve into history by means of cinematic adaptation. Experiencing this film could be a ‘historical autopsy’ that reviews the military opinion that Allende committed suicide. The script contains some ambiguity with respect to the medical findings, although it avoids voicing conspiracy theories in light of the military’s actions. Representing the autopsy of the president evokes a painful past, yet recreates a slice of history in spite of the 2011 report that corroborated his death as a suicide a year after the release of the film.

2  Spectacle and skepticism Part of the pushback against the movie arises from the political and historical skepticism that considers it to be a mere spectacle that commercializes the past. Chilean critic Nelly Richard 124

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(2007: p. 101) reminds us that ‘art should imagine new policies of the gaze that oppose the vision compared to the spectacle [espectáculo] of the images that applauds the capitalism of consumption’ (my emphasis). It is tempting to suggest that Post Mortem follows the guidelines of commercial cinema, with the goal to entertain an audience by collecting surplus capital. But calling the film a ‘spectacle’ is not inaccurate either, even when using the Spanish cognate of ‘espectáculo’ which means ‘entertaining public show’ as well as simply ‘public show’ or ‘public performance.’ The term ‘spectacle’ offers an etymological paradox derived from the Latin ‘specere’ or ‘spectare’ meaning ‘to look, contemplate, or observe.’ Nevertheless, some variants of the root of this word ‘spek’ form the Greek ‘skep’ from which words such as ‘skeptical,’ ‘scope,’ ‘suspect,’ and ‘speculate’ are formed (Park, 2014: p. 90). With this etymology in mind, this cinematic ‘spectacle’ can be a source of skepticism, meticulous observation, doubt, and speculation. Cinematic representation can surely recreate a past as an object under observation by an investigative and critical audience. Fiction serves as a lens or filter to spy on (versions of) history and requires the viewer to be a suspicious observer, a pseudo-thanatologist reviewing a corpse but in the form of moving pictures. Coincidentally, the word ‘autopsy’ shares certain semantics with the word ‘espejo’ (‘mirror,’ in Spanish) given that autopsy means to ‘self-eyewitness,’ ‘personal observation,’ or ‘look oneself.’ The spectacle in Post Mortem not only offers the ability to look at others, but the possibility of retrospectivity and self-reflection. Movies have an introspective power, perhaps confirming the hopes of Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ where he suggested that the mechanical technology of photography (in this case, cinematography or photography in motion) might be useful for class consciousness of the masses, even if the auratic value of works of art is lost by the reproduction (1991b reprint).

3  Historical autopsy The concept of ‘historical autopsy derives from the field of medical thanatology.’7 Rodríguez and Verdú define ‘historical autopsy’ as research on medical causes and circumstances of a death with historical interest, which is based on the critical, harmonious, hierarchical interpretation, and objectives of the whole information provided by documents and testimony, with no direct access to the corpse or the skeletal remains. 2003: p. 127 Although historical autopsies generally lack ‘direct access to the corpse or the skeletal remains,’ the 2011 investigation did get access to Allende’s remains, allowing investigators to carefully focus on ‘the causes and the circumstances of the death.’ In general terms, this practice can be very common in legal cases that require the corpse for more modern chemical analysis that could develop newer legal evidence. Nonetheless, the term could be helpful outside the exclusive practice by forensic scientists and thanatologists. For instance, viewers and readers have the possibility of practicing historical autopsy, albeit artificial, as spectators and critics of cultural products. Moreover, other artifacts that demonstrate the life and death of the deceased (legal documents, representations, and recreations) allow the public to share the forensic experience under the practice of ‘historical autopsy.’ Even though the public lacks the training and access to use medical instruments and technological tools, they can still draw conclusions from the cinematic examination, through critical historicism, as well as bibliographic and cross-examined publications from experts and witnesses in related fields. 125

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With this broader definition in mind, any (historical) autopsy is by definition postmortem, since the medical analysis always occurs after the subject dies. However, the Latin expression itself, ‘postmortem’ is often used in medical circles to describe damages or changes that the body of a deceased has suffered after the vital signs confirm the death of an individual. Therefore, the film’s title could foreshadow the subliminal and sinister ambition of the film, beyond the mere morbid recreation of the examination. In other words, the title could question whether the wound to the skull of Allende’s corpse was itself the sole cause of his death, or if the brain injury was produced postmortem. In fact, based on a ‘reliable copy of the historical document’ that indicated details that challenged witnesses and accounts that assured that the president committed suicide, the Uruguayan forensic scientist Hugo Rodríguez proposed that there are obvious indications that Allende’s deadly wounds could have been postmortem (Célis, 2011; Leiva, 2011). The physician was one of many voices that challenged the medical conclusions of 1973, using modern technologies that could revise the official history. Rather than the absolute truth, the film strives to instill historical inquiry and perhaps an emotional inquiry. By observing the cinematic necropsy of Allende’s death in the larger context of his emblematic role in the politics and history of Chile, how can his absence in the diegesis challenge the controversial ‘canonization’ of his figure? The film lacks any representation of Allende’s life, his many memorable speeches and daring idealism towards a democratic socialism, opting to solely represent him as a ruined corpse with a shattered skull. With the exception of references in some characters’ conversation, none of Allende’s words or images are recreated in the diegesis, exclusively representing him in the form of a dead corpse. Nonetheless, the absolute silence paradoxically emphasizes other aspects of the shared violence – namely, through the large number of bodies that are brought to the hospital due to the many arrests, interrogations, tortures, and purges performed by the army. Allende’s wounded body symbolizes the broken mirror that solicits historical revisionisms that reformulate a more heterogeneous, holistic, yet impossible narrative of the lost past, perhaps what Giorgio Agamben calls the ‘lacuna’ from trauma and death (2005).

4  Sacrilegious canonization Post Mortem failed to agitate the audience in similar ways as Tony Manero did, but the abundance of dark humor is true to his auteurism. Likewise, Post Mortem does not fit into the genre of comedy or drama, and it deviates from the historical film genre as it represents the fictional lives of those surrounding the historical icon. Nevertheless, just like Tony Manero, it abounds with sexual and violent scenes that likely disgust spectators, yet create suspense, given the possible affective power of Allende’s figure. The dark humor in Tony Manero consists of events that give rise to discomfort that are in tension with moments of utmost seriousness. The protagonist of Post Mortem is socially awkward which is demonstrated by some of his rather unusual behavior (though mild compared to the defecation scene in Tony Manero).This unusual behavior prevents the spectators from being sympathetic towards him. There is an affective distance that separates the viewer from the protagonist. The recreation of the autopsy of Allende is executed in the context of contrasting comical and solemn tones.The scenes, without any cuts, are subtly persuasive when trying to ‘reopen’ the president’s suicide case as they recreate the entire medical process of examining the skull with an uncomfortable humor and, at the same time, a stifling solemnity. A film that features the corpse of Allende that was filled with dark humor was unthinkable, but if anything, it dared to delve into the absurdity or impossibility of ‘writing poetry’ after a catastrophe, trespassing Adorno’s dictum on the impossibility of creating poetry after Auschwitz (Adorno in Rowland, 1997).The 126

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production and release of Post Mortem was contemporary to the legal case that reexamined the previous medical conclusions concerning Allende’s death. At the time of the film’s production, this investigation had not yet confirmed the previous rulings of suicide. The media circulated news of legal proceedings that were conducted to reopen the case, including new evidence and new medical technologies. This new evidence lent support to the opinion that the ruling of suicide was ‘artificially official.’ Media reports identifying ‘lost’ evidence and original documents which were not preserved amplified the doubts (Leiva, 2011). Within this socio-historical context, the anticipation of the screening of Post Mortem exposed the public to a baffling cognitive dissonance. Perhaps the dialectic of awareness and nihilism allowed the collective memory to be perpetuated with a duality of truth, and a speculation of the alternative history. This duality of truth and speculation reflects the most important contribution of the film in Chile’s collective memory. Rather than merely asking if he committed suicide at all, the film implicitly reiterates one of the common pressing dilemmas that relate to the death of Allende:What are the implications of a suicide by Allende? What would have happened if the Junta imprisoned, tortured, and killed Allende? What would have happened if Allende left the country as an exile? Would Chile have been a site for an escalating Civil War, or perhaps a replica of the Korean War,Vietnam War, or the invasion of Panama? Generally speaking, Post Mortem represents neither a resentful nor a glorified Left. Towards the end of the film, those characters that would be identified as potential militants do not rebel; instead, they hide. Some of them even surrender to military terror without resistance. Ultimately, there is a cynical representation of the militant past, a kind of hypocrisy of ideologies, and certainly, a relatively subdued representation of the military savagery. For example, the army appears to be part of the walls of the forensic surgery room that carefully watch the movements of Dr. Castillo. Meanwhile, Mario transcribes the details of the autopsy, a possible allusion to the curfew and omnipresent surveillance in the streets of Santiago during the dictatorship. The soldiers lack emotion and their presence suggests the oppression and suppressed violence in a subtle and silent manner, which barely manifests itself in the dying people covering the streets and halls of the hospital. The uniformed military recalls ecclesiastical images, and hierarchical order, yet again evoking codes of religious ideology and sectarian politicians, motifs that are so present in Larraín’s filmography. Larraín’s filmography often seeks to demystify iconic historical figures. For instance, in his 2016 feature film Neruda Larraín portrays the Chilean Nobel laureate as an obnoxious, at times naïve, and often arrogant narcissist; while in Jackie (2016) Larraín subdues John F. Kennedy’s expected diegetic prominence with his wife’s cynical and cunning persona, by representing the American president mostly as a corpse, and seldom as an active character in the narrative. Post Mortem achieves the demystification of Allende through the empty socialist rhetoric of Dr. Castillo, with his insecure, monotonous, and repetitive voice. The demystification explicitly occurs through the representation of the corpse, centered in the most important shot of the film, with carefully crafted photography and lighting, centering the corpse with a dim natural light and the many subjects surrounding the body to medically examine or guard. Castillo capitulates to military orders, and instead of resisting, he resorts to his medical profession and hides his political opinion. Although the politically polarized audience in Chile would catalog this film as either for or against Allende, the narrative avoids mere politicization and instead, it delves into the political indifference and the irreverence of the main character. In addition, the spectator should not overlook the story of Mario, who is madly in love with Nancy and uninterested in the political divide. Post Mortem treats the historical background as if the ideals of socialism and neoliberalism had no importance compared to the miserable love story of Mario.This love story forms the main plot of the diegesis, which is eclipsed by the cumbersome ambition to recreate 127

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the autopsy. Ultimately, the movie does not restore a haughty image of Allende, resurrecting him through the fervor of his followers. Rather, the recreation of the disintegrating bodies in the morgue allows the other disappeared bodies, of those who were certainly killed by the army, to take center stage with a disturbing realism. A humanist reading would ‘re-canonize’ Allende through a subtle reinterpretation, by suggesting that the film emphasizes a different truth: although few doubt that the cause of Allende’s death was murder, the death of many others was undeniably caused by the brutality of the dictatorship.

5  The present perfect The political marches in the streets interrupt the pathetic love story of the protagonist and Nancy, whose dates consist of drinking Coca-Cola, eating fried eggs, and driving through Santiago. Public politics (marches and speeches) and private politics (gatherings and meetings in homes) interfere with the romantic plot. At home, Mario never addresses political issues and does not participate in any marches or political events. At work, he physically distances himself from Dr. Castillo when he speaks of Allende, and in his social circles, he opts to remain silent. Mario prefers a simple life without ideological passions, but absolute devotion to loving Nancy. However, it is impossible to escape from the opposing forces that are manifested in the streets of Santiago, his neighborhood, and even at work. The film is initially slow and monotonous, but is interrupted by sequences of acute tension. Certainly, the monotonous and repetitive environment in the hospital suddenly houses one of the most controversial moments of Chilean cinema when they recreate, verbatim, the report of the president’s death: ‘Cause of death: cervical wound, aperture of the brain, with a bullet exit [. . .] the shot could have been provoked by the person himself.’ The distress of the scene is then replaced with skepticism: the doctor cannot assure with absolute certainty that suicide was the only cause of death. Therefore, even though the protagonist is negligent to the historical moment, the scene opens doubt to the audience. While the likely possibility that Allende committed suicide is enough for Mario to celebrate that Nancy’s boyfriend is in trouble, for the audience, hearing the official description of the medical cause of death for the first time could be distressful. ‘The wound’ is the cause of the death, says Dr. Castillo without much ambiguity. However, the doctor does not use the past tense to conclude suicide as the only explanation for the death. Instead, the doctor uses a compounded verb, the perfect present and the verb ‘poder’ (‘to be able to’) with an emphasis on the impersonality of the verb, leaving an uncomfortable possibility that although the wound ‘was’ (past of the indicative) the cause of the death, the shot also ‘could have been performed (provocado)’ by another person. Castillo affirms that ‘the shot could have been performed [provocado] by the person’ indicating that Allende possibly committed suicide. In part, the impersonal rhetoric of scientific terminology could explain this lack of accuracy at the conclusion of the autopsy, but even so, any possibility of uncertainty induces skepticism, especially since the doctor is surrounded by soldiers inside a military hospital that largely supports the new Commander in Chief, General Augusto Pinochet. Dr. Castillo’s conclusion already causes some discomfort by its historical weight, but other details in the scene can amplify the viewer’s anxiety. Dr. Castillo, avid preacher of the policies of Allende, must obey the military and follow all the procedures that they order with meticulous care. Sandra must assist in the autopsy and clearly feels anxious about the bodies that are piled up in the morgue and the hospital halls, as trucks of soldiers keep dumping more corpses in and around the hospital. Sandra is the only one who expresses her frustration with an outburst – a disturbing moment since the military men neither silence nor punish her. Nonetheless, perhaps neither the submissive silence of Dr. Castillo nor the anxiety of his assistant manage to disturb 128

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the viewer in the way that Mario reacts to the report. The protagonist reacts with a slight smile after hearing the medical conjecture of suicide, who unlike his colleagues, does not seem to be agitated by the presence of Allende’s corpse in the operating room, nor the military, nor the hundreds of corpses that the forensic team will need to dissect to deduce the obvious cause of death (i.e. beatings, assault, torture). The informed viewer, however, assumes that the military violence is the evident cause of death of so many. Allende’s suicide makes the protagonist happy, who up until then had not smiled except with Nancy. Coincidentally, the conjugation of the report in present perfect (‘has been able’) suggests that suicide is also a ‘perfect present’ (an ideal gift, pun intended) to consummate his relationship with Nancy without the interruptions of political marches and gatherings that are dedicated to raising awareness and communal solidarity. Mario suspects that Allende’s death is the beginning of an uninterrupted relationship with Nancy, since her activist boyfriend (Victor) will not be able to freely meet with her and roam around the city on dates, political rallies, and social gatherings. In fact, he notices that since the army has closed down her club, Nancy would be unemployed and possibly depend on Mario. Seemingly, Mario’s quiet celebration is understood as Victor is linked to the militant Left, and this link could lead to an armed struggle, and possibly, his death. However, towards the end of the film, Victor chooses to leave the armed cause and hides with Nancy in Mario’s courtyard. The film’s open ending suggests that Mario likely kills Nancy and Victor by indefinitely confining them in the shed. He piles up furniture at the door of the shed to punish them both, portrayed in a medium close-up shot and diegetic sounds of furniture being moved closer to the shed’s only exit door. The gloomy and silent tone suggests that Mario will leave them there to die as the camera slowly fades into black before abruptly cutting all diegetic sound. The credits roll as the soundtrack of extra-diegetic delayed piano chords uncannily adds to a layered sound of highly reverbed pseudo-human muted screams. This last scene could evoke the desapariciones that occurred after the coup without melodramatic undertones. In this case, the crime is not caused by a military force, unlike the rest of the arrests, tortures, and disappearances that were planned by the Junta led by Pinochet. If the military were to find out that Mario punished former militants, he would not be seen as a traitor, but rather, as a collaborator, a hero. His crime would be rationalized as he would have been punishing people like Victor who were supporters of the militancy, and Nancy would be considered an accomplice. Jealousy and infatuation lead Mario to be willing to commit a double homicide, or at least, ‘trap’ them so the military can arrest them and interrogate them. On the surface, it would be a crime of passion, but in the eyes of the military, it would be conveniently deemed as an anti-communist, pro-Pinochet, and patriotic service. Mario accidentally becomes an accomplice in the disappearance of ‘terrorists,’ when in fact, his macabre aim is to assassinate both for revenge and resentment.

6  Borges and ‘savior’ Allende: mourning the hero-traitor Jorge Luis Borges’s famous tale ‘Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’ (1944; 2005a reprint) reformulates the condition of a hero since an alternative narrative could reframe the hero as a traitor. Likewise, in his postmortem condition, the ‘traitor’ president might become ‘a hero’ if it is proven that his death was not a suicide, but rather, a murder. This interpretation would turn him into a martyr, since his death would have been a ‘sacrifice.’ His suicide would have possibly avoided an armed civil war in a Chile that Allende (according to leftist apologists) repeatedly rejected as an option. An armed militancy existed after the coup, led by Miguel Enríquez and Andrés Pascal Allende (the nephew of the president), but ultimately, that single shot by Allende 129

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himself discarded the possibility of a massive armed revolution according to his many followers. Allende preferred to have a revolution with the worker’s unity and democracy as its only weapons. Still, the film could revise history and speculate on different versions of what happened. How is it possible that a leader who rejected the use of the armed forces caused his own death with the rifle that Castro gifted him? Many insist that this death prevented the rise of a guerrilla, armed resistance like the many leftist armed revolutions in the Americas. However, his death is interpreted by others as the immediate option that prevented Chile from suffering from more bellicose confrontations. Some felt his sacrifice as an act of devotion, but others mourned his death as defeat for the first successful democratic socialist project without active armed forces in history. The ‘defeat’ of the Left or the ‘crisis of Marxism’ are terms used by Brazilian thinker Idelber Avelar and American Douglas Kellner, respectively, as thoughtful self-criticism of Marxist thought which recognizes the pragmatic and ontological difficulties of Marxist ideals in modern and current political scenarios (1999; 1984). Defeat and crisis should be central in the motifs that refer to Allende’s rise to power and eventual demise under foreign interventions and pressures coordinated by Nixon’s orders (2006). Although Allende’s death is not explicitly considered a murder by the film, nor by the latest medical findings, the film requires that the spectators practice historical autopsy through other means. While Larraín does not include heroic characters or rebels against the military (except Sandra), it is impossible to observe those seemingly valiant characters with sympathy. In the movie, military men are not main characters, and in general, they are one-dimensional and monotonous subjects who obey the instructions of their superiors. Their faces are obscured in the shadows and their facial details go unnoticed. Dr. Castillo obeys military orders, certainly hinting that some supporters of the socialist president did not or could not resist. Moreover, the demystification of Allende creates a historical re-enactment. The extra-diegetic affection humanizes his figure and revitalizes the relevance of peaceful struggle and civil disobedience as the only way towards a democratic socialism. Contextualized to recent events, the manifestations in the Chilean school and college marches since 2011 are a result of Allende’s posture of the revolution without armed resistance, in spite of claims that violent anarchists have successfully convinced media sources that the marches attempt to evolve into violent confrontations with the police and damages to infrastructure and vehicles. Nonetheless, this ‘unarmed revolution’ attempts to glue together the cracked mirror in a stained-glass mosaic which enshrines the president in a human, humanitarian, auratic, and perhaps, messianic way. The fragmented memory can never be a perfect reflection or perfect copy of an image, but it can be reflective (thoughtful, meditative). My interpretation of the corpse as a ‘ruin’ is formulated from the proposals of Lazzara and Unruh, who propose that ruins do not invite a nostalgia of ‘looking into the past,’ but rather, start a ‘reflexive excavation’ that allows us see a ‘historical review and the creation of alternative futures’ (2009: p. 3). In addition, by not exalting the president as martyred, the emphasis turns to the other dying and dead people in the diegesis. The historical desaparecidos ‘appear,’ yet again, challenging claims by officials that many desaparecidos were merely living cowardly in clandestine corners of the country or happily exiled abroad. Conversely, the body of Allende, an emblem of unarmed democratic socialism, does not disappear, like the many bodies that are buried in the immensity of the Atacama Desert, in the depths of the Pacific, the currents of rivers, and in the heights of Andean peeks. The portrayal of the shattered body is significant, just as the many beaten and bloody representations of Christ in cathedrals. Post Mortem takes an audacious discourse since the film does not celebrate the death of Allende as an indication of ideological superiority. In many ways, the film works as an allegory 130

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of a lament of what was the hope of the Left, without the melodrama and sentimentality, as in the case of Machuca (2004) by Andrés Wood, or documentaries with subjective voices, such as Patricio Guzmán’s Salvador Allende (2004) and Nostalgia for the Light (2010). Although melodramas and the subjective documentary can incite mourning and critical historicism, Post Mortem simply implies hesitation occurred when determining the human cause of death. A film does not resurrect a president who ‘could not have provoked’ his own death. But thousands undeniably have died without further explanation than the mechanical military violence, and Post Mortem might be the only Chilean film (cf. Greek director Costa-Gavras’s Missing [1982] portrays military violence) that explicitly included them in the diegesis. The archaeological ruins are not preserved to be rebuilt, but to serve as memorials that stimulate the possibility of not forgetting the past and as noted by Andreas Huyssen, to ‘remember the future’ (1999: p. 15).

7  Recreating mourning Artistic direction that equipped Larraín’s films are instrumental in creating verisimilitude, allowing the viewer to look once more to the Chile of the ’70s, with meticulous details, such as ads and vehicles, that recreate those years. The longing and the nostalgia is evident as films and TV shows set in the ’70s and ’80s have become increasingly popular (e.g. Los 80, 2008–2014). The diegesis also includes spaces and events that were in the lacuna of oblivion or censorship: corpses in the streets, the military that make rounds, the somber mood, and the languish of those postmortem years following Allende’s death. The gray tones remind us of films by Patricio Guzmán, giving an aspect of archival historicity to the film. The lack of lighting in repeated scenes, reminiscent of cinéma vérité aesthetics, recreates the forced curfew during state of emergencies. Some shots look like images filmed by home-made cameras, a technique that Larraín uses in No (2012). The artistic direction and post-production is noteworthy during the shots that recreate the operating room, with stark claroscuro aesthetics that might recall German expressionism, often accentuating the dramatic diegesis through the use of incandescent light and bleak shadows.The scene lacks cuts making it slow and frustrating, while challenging the formulaic fast paced editing so common in commercial cinema. The absence of extra diegetic music and the absence of cuts allow the movie to have a realistic effect. Nevertheless, the risky recreation of the autopsy is strangely tactical; although there is stupor, there is also some humor that softens the tension of the spectator. Mario cannot type fast enough to keep up with Dr. Castillo’s dictations and observations during the autopsy, so they must be repeated and rewritten by one of many soldiers surrounding Allende’s body. Mario is replaced by a soldier that can use the typewriter much faster than he can, subtly recalling how in the early ’70s, much of the clerical work in hospitals was largely shifting to mechanical typewriters, faithfully evoking historical details.This also adds another symbolic layer that the military was involved in many levels of ‘writing history’ as the ‘winners.’ Affectively, spectators find these moments humorous as they confirm the pathetic condition of the protagonist, but at the same time, they cannot ignore the extreme seriousness of the sequence. Somehow, this cinematic moment can be, for many Chileans, the first and only ‘funeral ceremony’ that mourns Allende’s death.

8  Impotence and the power of silent mourning The erotic obsession that keeps Mario from consummating the sexual act is connected to impotence, a narrative motif that is a recurring and metaphorical theme in Larraín’s previous feature film, Tony Manero. For instance, the movie features a Chilean murderous psychopath protagonist 131

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(played by Alfredo Castillo) who is obsessed with the main character of Saturday Night Fever (1977), played by John Travolta during the early years of the dictatorship in Chile (1973–1988). But unlike the sexual pathos in Tony Manero, the impotence in Post Mortem is not sexual, but optical, and from the audience’s side of the screen. Spectators of Tony Manero look at naked bodies, dismal sexual encounters, and murders with minimal cuts, with unexpected turns as the fictional character roams around the city killing and finding new ways to become Tony Manero. Post Mortem alternatively deals with specific historical figures, most importantly Allende’s lifeless body, and different historical characters who surrounded his corpse minutes and hours after the coup. Spectators are impotent to the irreversible history; they are ‘castrated’ before the ruined body of Allende.The audience is powerless before the course of the diegesis that parallels history because we share the characters’ impotence. We see the soon to be desaparecidos with no power other than observation, lament, and speculation. But what is the goal or benefit of challenging the official story through a viewer’s impotent ‘historical autopsy?’ Were the bodies of nameless Chileans portrayed in the film realistic representations of some of the 3,000 desaparecidos? Were there uproars by others similar to Sandra? If there were any, did the soldiers intervene or seldom leave them uninterrupted? Would it be possible to change history postmortem? Are the current marches demanding education reform in Chile a legacy of Allende’s agenda? Have these ideals been shattered by consumerist neoliberal forces that only allow the impotence or the unconsciousness of the masses to be the only alternative future? Recognizing defeat and impotence against a biopolitical force is crucial in the process of practicing historical autopsy. A power that could influence ideology and many other facets of life can be challenged when mutilated and ruined bodies are also used to reconsider history and reflecting alternate versions of the past. Acknowledging defeat can mean remembering, judging, grieving, speculating, and revising history, without blinding idealisms that rely on memories tainted with militant nostalgia. Perhaps being a spectator could defy impotence, and observing could be all the attainable power we can have if we consider Foucault who suggests that the gaze has a power beyond which the observer consciously can recognize (1995). Although the gaze in Foucault’s definition is directly related to biopowers or surveillance, in this case, and just looking at ruins cannot rebuild them. Observing, however, can allow us the experience of ‘re-membering’ if it were true we were impotently castrated from accessing truth. Re-visioning (looking again) can be an important exercise that insists that official histories and accounts can seemingly offer a fleeting truth. The repeated observation, as indicated by the word re-vision, permits us to challenge the monolithic official history as a picture that can be changed (revised) after a new look. In Tony Manero, the disco ball works as a metaphor of the recent history of Chile like a broken mirror. Likewise, Post Mortem reworks the introspective gaze, or rather, an ‘auto-spective’ process through historical autopsy as spectators dissect a body of evidence, and observe its many details until reaching a conclusion. The film reveals a multitude of bodies whose abuse and extermination was the result of a ‘pre-mortem condition’ of sympathy for Allende. Collective historical autopsy invites us to find ourselves in an alternate history in which Allende is sacrilegiously de-consecrated as a vulnerable human being. Reconsidering the mythical hero as a vulnerable person who chose to take his own life, in turn, consecrates the character in ‘postmortem times.’ The corporal ruin is not an ideological one as the suicide itself is often interpreted as a persistent reminder that if violence will be used, it will be self-inflicted, rather than performed on others. Allende’s actions become re-evaluated, a postmodern neoliberalism where the desaparecidos are still missing along with the obliterated memories vanished in lacunas due to death of witnesses of the horror. Self-reflection is urgent but difficult, or impossible, just 132

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as the reflection is fragmented as we attempt to view ourselves in a disco ball, or distressing and upsetting as attempting to recognize ourselves in a crushed corpse. With Pinochet’s and Allende’s corpses in ever changing media for years, this film reminds us that we still live in ‘postmortem times,’ when ideologies lack mass fervor and consumerism of pleasant and accessible films dominate the public searches. Larraín challenges the visual pleasure of the spectator, demanding that we turn our eyes to a complex and painful moment in history. Although we see the bodies of the detained and the tortured postmortem, the film never ceases to bother us with the reality that the death of the thousands was not the result of a crime of passion, as the main plot of the film, but a perverse mechanism which was responsible for the deaths of many without the need of an autopsy. Walter Benjamin suggests in ‘The Narrator,’ that ‘dying was once a public process’ and that ‘it is the dying man in whom knowledge and wisdom and above all his lived life acquire a suddenly transmissible form, and this is the material from which stories are born’ (1991a: p. 45). In the case of Post Mortem, dying people do not narrate, but rather, a dead man’s silence and several others’ lifeless bodies do the speaking. They were soon to be completely removed from any public and private space. A lacuna of thousands of bodies that represent a historical reality can quietly be dissected by diegetic medical practitioners and even more thousands of skeptical and speculative viewers, in order to acquire certain ‘knowledge and wisdom’ or at least speculate about conflicting stories of the past, from a narrative of silence and mourning, about a deadly man, a dead man and many others who disappeared along with their stories that died with them. Key words: Chile, Allende, historical autopsy, public death, spectacle

Notes 1 Allende is the first freely democratically elected socialist president in history, by creating an alliance among the Partido Comunista, Partido Socialista, Partido Radical, Partido Social Demócrata, Movimiento de Acción Popular Unitaria, and the Acción Popular Independiente, as well as other support from left-wing newly created parties and political groups. 2 Guzman’s documentary opens with an extensive personal narration, and focuses on the thick black frames of Allende’s glasses as a metonymy of an intellectual and noble, yet revolutionary personality, reminding us of Trotsky’s broken glasses on the house in Coyoacán (currently the Leon Trotsky Museum) where the Soviet politician was murdered. Featuring his glasses is one of the first postmortem remnants of Allende’s (extended) body that anticipates new explicit representations of dead bodies in Chilean cinema. It is also a blunt opportunity to remember the painful cause of his death, as the director interviews many who could undoubtedly confirm the president’s last minutes of life. 3 Arial Awards (Mexico), Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Altazor Award, Havana Film Festival, Istanbul International Film Festival, Miami Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Torino Film Festival, Warsaw International Film Festival, among others. 4 His next film about the dictatorship, No (2012), featuring Mexican star Gael García Bernal (Amores perros, Motorcycle Diaries), is about the 1988 plebiscite and was nominated – among many other awards – for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. The film makes references to the desaparecidos in few but poignant moments. Larraín partnered with García Bernal for a second feature project in the neo-noir biopic Neruda (2016). That same year, Larraín directed the feature film Jackie (2016) starring Natalie Portman about Jackie Kennedy’s life after the 1963 assassination through a diegetic interview and several flashbacks that intertwine to form a biographical narrative. 5 Few commercial fictional feature films use the dictatorship as a narrative axis or historical diegetic background before 2004, but almost none treat the topic as directly as Post Mortem. See, for example: The Chinese Shoe (1980) by Cristián Sánchez, Sussi (1987) and Amnesia (1994) by Gonzalo Justiniano, I Love You (Made in Chile) (2001) by Sergio Castilla, Machuca (2004) by Andrés Wood, and My Best Enemy (2005) by Alex Bowen, among others. 6 A few examples are La Batalla de Chile (1975) by Patricio Guzmán, Imagen latente (1988), Fernando ha vuelto (1998) by Sivio Caiozzi, Imágenes de una dictadura (1999), La memoria herida (2004) de Francisco

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Moisés Park Casas, El diario de Agustín (2005) by Ignacio Agüero, La ciudad de los fotógrafos (2006) by Sebastián Moreno, The War on Democracy (2007) by Christopher Martin and John Pilger, La conspiración de Chicago (2010) by Subversive Action Films, Nostalgia de la luz (2010) by Patricio Guzmán, De vida y de muerte,Testimonios de la Operación Cóndor (2015) by Pedro Chaskel, among many others. 7 Rodríguez and Verdú (2003) study the past by means of medical analysis. This type of autopsy is common in the investigations of thanatology for people who observe skeletal remains that need to be analyzed to understand the cause of death. This also suggests that, as ‘there was no direct access’ to the skeletal remains, biotechnological advances enable research and findings that were not available at the time of death and the initial autopsy.

Further reading Avelar, I. (1999) The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Avelar treats the topics of defeat, mourning, and memory in postdictatorial Latin American fiction. Lazzara, M. and Unruch,V. (eds). (2009) Telling Ruins in Latin America. New York: Palgrave Macmillian. This edited collection explores the many variants of the theme of ‘ruins,’ whether it be sites or materiality of death and memory. Moulián, T. (1997) Chile actual: Anatomía de un mito. Santiago, CH: ARCIS Universidad. The most influential sociological insights on Chilean neoliberalism and the links between the dictatorship and postdictatorial Chile come from this study by sociologist Tomás Moulián. Richard, N. (1998) Residuos y metáforas: Ensayos de critica cultural sobre el Chile de la transición. Santiago, CH: Editorial Cuarto Propio. Nelly Richard is likely the most cited academic thinker on Chilean culture and politics, whose several books and articles analyze the legacy of Pinochet’s dictatorship, neoliberal politics, and memory studies in Chile. Residuos y metáforas serves as her seminal volume on the topic. Richard, N. (2007) Fracturas de la memoria: Arte y pensamiento critic. Buenos Aires, AR: Siglo Veintiuno Editores. Richard predominantly focuses on the study of memory and trauma in this 2007 volume.

Bibliography Agamben, G. (2005) Remnants of Auschwitz:The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books. Avelar, I. (1999) The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barraza Toledo, V. (2013) ‘Reviewing the Present in Pablo Larraín’s Historical Cinema,’ Iberoamericana, 13(51), pp. 159–172. Batalla de Chile (1975) [Motion Picture] Director and Writer P. Guzmán. Icarus Films. Benjamin,W. (1991a) ‘El narrador,’ in: Subirats, E. (ed). Para una crítica de la violencia y otros ensayos.Translated by R. Blatt. Madrid: Taurus, pp. 111–134 Benjamin, W. (1991b) ‘La obra de arte en la época de su reproductibilidad mecánica,’ in: Subirats, E. (ed). Para una crítica de la violencia y otros ensayos.Translated by R. Blatt. Madrid: Taurus. Borges, J. L. (2005a) ‘Tema del traidor y del héroe,’ in: Obras Completas I: Ficciones. Buenos Aires: Emecé, pp. 496–498. Borges, J. L. (2005b) ‘Funes el memorioso,’ in: Obras Completas I: Ficciones. Buenos Aires: Emecé, pp. 519–525. Célis, É. (2011) ‘Allende había sido asesinado, revela autopsia,’ Radio Noticias 1070 Guadalajara [online], 31 May 2011. Available at: www.1070noticias.com/index.php?option=com_content&view =article&id= 5370:allende-habria-sido-asesinado-revela-autopsia&catid =111:america&Itemid=526. [Accessed 30 September 2012]. Foucault, M. (1995) Discipline and Punishment:The Birth of the Prison. New York:Vintage Books. Huyssen, A. (1999) ‘La cultura de la memoria: medios, política y amnesia,’ Revista de crítica cultural, 18, pp. 8–15. Jackie (2016) [Motion picture] Director P. Larraín. Fox Searchlight.

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Post Mortem (2010) Kellner, D. (1984) Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism. Berkeley: University of California. Larraín Pulido, C. (2010) ‘Nuevas tendencias del cine chileno tras la llegada del cine digital,’ Aisthesis, 47, pp. 156–171. Lazzara, M. and Unruch,V. (2009)’ Introduction: Telling Ruins,’ in: Lazzara, M. and Unruch,V. (eds). Telling Ruins in Latin America. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, pp. 1–9. Leiva, C. (2011) ‘Allende: “Informe especial” atizó las interrogantes en la investigación judicial,’ La nación [online], 1 June. Available at: http://salvadorallende.blog.lemonde.fr/2011/06/01/allende%E2%80%9Cinforme-especial%E2%80%9D-atizo-las-interrogantes-en-la-investigacion-judicial/. [Accessed 1 October 2017]. Los 80 (2008–2014) [TV Series] Canal 13 and Wood Producciones. Machuca (2004) [Motion picture] Chile: Director A. Wood. Wood Producciones. Missing (1982) [Motion picture] Director Costa-Gavras. Universal Studios. Moulián, T. (1997) Chile ctual: Anatomía de un mito. Santiago, CH: ARCIS Universidad. No (2012) [Motion picture] Director P. Larraín. Sony Pictures. Nostalgia for the Light (2010) [Motion picture] Director and Writer P. Guzmán. Neruda (2016) [Motion picture] Director P. Larraín. Lorber Films. Park, M. (2014) Figuraciones del deseo y coyunturas generacionales en la narrativa y el cine de Chile. New York: Peter Lang. Pinochet (2012) [Motion picture] Director I. Zegers. Post Mortem (2012) [Motion picture] Director P. Larraín. Lorber Films. Ramírez, E. (2010) ‘Estrategias para (no) olvidar: Notas sobre dos documentales chilenos de la postdictadura,’ Aisthesis, 47, pp. 45–63. Richard, N. (2001) Residuos y metáforas: Ensayos de critica cultural sobre el Chile de la transición. Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio. Richard, N. (2007) Fracturas de la memoria: Arte y pensamiento critic. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores. Rodríguez, H. and Verdú, F. A. (2003) ‘Autopsia histórica: Presentación del método y su aplicación al estudio de un hecho violento ocurrido en Uruguay en el año 1972,’ Revista Médica Uruguaya, 19(2), pp. 126–139. Rowland, A. (1997) ‘Re-reading “Impossibility” and “Barbarism”: Adorno and post-Holocaust poetics,’ Critical Survey, 9(1), pp. 57–69. Salvador Allende (2004) [Motion picture] Director and Writer P. Guzmán. Icarus Films. Sarlo, B. (2005) Tiempo pasado. Siglo Veintiuno Editores. Saturday Night Fever (1977) [Motion picture] Director J. Badham. Paramount Pictures. Stern, S. J. (2006) Battling for Hearts and Minds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tony Manero (2008) [Motion picture] Director P. Larraín. Lorber Films. Urrutia, C. (2010) ‘Hacia una política en tránsito: Ficción en el cine chileno (2008–2010),’ Aisthesis, 47, pp. 33–44.

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12 MOURNING DEATHS AND CONSTRUCTING AFTERLIVES IN THE RED ARMY AT WAR Steven G. Jug

1 Introduction Reflecting on his experiences after less than a year at the front in 1943, Mansur Abdulin, a Red Army mortar crew gun-layer, described his feelings about killing and death: By nature, I am a tender and sensitive person. I was never a hooligan or a brawler. But when I went to war I wanted to destroy the Fritzes: “Kill or be killed.” This was my message to the newcomers. I was consumed by the idea that while alive, I would have my revenge on the Germans in advance: for I never expected to survive the slaughter. Once, on my initiative, we shot no less than 200 wounded Nazis in some vegetable store. I must note with some regret, however, that the majority of our soldiers were passive, and either perished or were wounded without trying to destroy even a single German (sometimes without even seeing the enemy). I felt great despair and anguish when I witnessed the death of our soldiers, who had just arrived from the rear. I wept. I could not control my emotions. Abdulin, 2004: p. 109 The challenge of fearing death, coping with loss, perpetrating violence, and pursuing vengeance as a link among them, formed a core part of frontline culture for Red Army soldiers. Operating in a homosocial context, Abdulin had no need to identify the norms and emotions attached to violence as masculine, and yet they anchored the gendered notions of death and duty that informed frontline culture. Surviving combat veterans like Abdulin earned an unofficial authority with which to shape the frontline culture that replacements would enter. Indeed, that authority reflected a cycle, as he had been initiated into the norms of a veteran-directed combat collective in 1942. Abdulin juxtaposed killing and witnessing death as emotional experiences, which provides a representative glimpse at how soldiers judged the consuming hatred that prompted revenge as more useful than the debilitating feelings of despair that led to weeping. This chapter examines the development of soldiers’ ideas and practices about frontline death as distinct without losing all connection to peacetime precedents. Drawing from scholarship on death and mourning, memory, gender, subjectivity, and combat motivation, I analyze Red Army troops’ and propagandists’ divergent responses to frontline deaths in war. In a wartime battle 136

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zone, killing existed as not only a potential act, but as a necessary element of survival among those mourning a death. Troops like Abdulin found death to be something that bound them to comrades in both the passive experience of shared loss, as in a family, and also in the active pursuit of violence that would provide the appearance of restitution. The dynamic of comradeship and revenge provided a central framework in which to interpret the significance of death and the authority to shape comrades’ afterlives in a manner rarely available to the average Soviet citizen. Focusing on death at the front, rather than wartime violence more generally, I adapt the approach of death studies scholar Tony Walter, who cautions that scholars must ‘look not only at the beliefs about life after death, but also the social and bodily context in which such beliefs are or are not plausible’ (Walter, 1996). Accordingly, I organize my study around those three categories after a brief sketch of the prewar context of beliefs and treatment of bodies for a particular social group: Soviet political and military elites. Methodologically, I examine death at the front through the lenses of remembrance, gender, and subjectivity. The chapter then unfolds in four parts. First, it considers bodily context through wartime burial organization. Second, the chapter explores contrasting descriptions of slain soldiers’ bodies in propaganda and actual burial practices of frontline combatants. Third, it analyzes Red Army beliefs about death through the mourning or lack of it in response to different types of frontline death, with further emphasis on the divergence between propaganda and the rank-and-file. Fourth, it engages the social dynamics implicit in burial and belief-development by investigating how soldiers produced symbolic afterlives for comrades by writing condolence letters and vowing revenge within them. I treat the wartime context as crucial to understanding the difference in beliefs as well as practices, since soldiers’ distinct position as regular witnesses of death in battle set them apart from both propagandists and family members at home. Red Army troops wrote from memory days or even decades after their experience of combat, because the chaotic and dangerous nature of front life limited their ability to write at great lengths contemporaneously. To discern general practices and beliefs from a series of individual sources, I employ historian of war and memory Jay Winter’s distinction between collective memory and remembrance. Winter argues that remembrance ‘insists on specific agency, on answering the question of who remembers, when, where, and how’ while collective memory exists as ‘the process through which different collectives, from groups of two, to groups of thousands, engage in acts of remembrance together’ (Winter, 2006: pp. 3, 4). This chapter primarily analyzes individual remembrances in the form of soldiers’ letters, journals, memoirs, and oral history interviews, to gain insight into the collective memory of comrades’ deaths that emerged from frontline funerals, conversations, and correspondence with relatives of the fallen. Propaganda and official sources, such as newspapers and reports, operate as part of a larger process of ‘collective remembrance’ in Winter’s terms, in which different collectives engage in acts of remembrance in different times and places (Winter, 2006: pp. 5–9). Dealing with the particular challenges of the Soviet context, in which constraints on public expression and dissent intensified in wartime, I situate soldiers’ and veterans’ writings as straddling the realms of public, collective, and individual memory, drawing from Cathy Frierson’s recent work on survivors’ childhood memories of Stalin’s Terror and the war (Frierson, 2015: p. 7). She notes that survivors’ recollections provide value regarding what happened, but ‘are most trustworthy as evidence of how’ they remembered episodes in their lives (Frierson, 2015: p. 15). In regard to death in war, rather than the efficacy of weapons systems, frequency of atrocities, or ideological motives, such sources provide particular insight. Red Army official and soldierly responses to death at the front, as well as the differences between them, reveal a considerable emphasis on gendered expectations and values. As 137

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anthropologist Ana Maria Alonso demonstrates, modern state rhetoric about mobilization and national sacrifice rests on ‘the fusion of the ideological and the sensory, the bodily and the normative’ (1994: p. 386). The Soviet fusion, in Alonso’s formulation, privileged the ideological over the bodily, which resulted in disembodied heroic dead that bore little resemblance to real fighting men deserving vengeance or Red Army servicewomen being mourned. To examine Red Army troops’ gendered ideas about death and self, I adapt gender historian Michael Roper’s methodological claim that soldiers’ writings, not just their actions at the front, constitute a site of gender performance, in which relationships with comrades and correspondence with family shaped soldiers’ subjectivities (2009: pp. 301, 302). Soviet women’s successful struggle to enter the ranks of the wartime Red Army disrupted those relationships and changed the social and symbolic landscape of the front. The afterlives male soldiers imagined for women who died at the front reveals an incomplete acceptance of women’s presence at the front, which official rhetoric about wartime death echoed. I argue that soldiers’ beliefs and practices surrounding death differed from both peacetime precedents and official wartime norms, but retained a degree of continuity in the masculine values and assumptions that all three manifested.

2  Peacetime death and mourning in official culture Soviet Russia inherited Orthodox Christian ideas about death that emphasized how the end of life marked a transition, not the conclusion, of human existence. As Catherine Merridale summarizes (2001: pp. 24–26), in late Tsarist Russia, the canonical church view held that death began the transition from mortal life to judgment in the afterlife, which would culminate in eternal life or damnation.This transitional phase of the afterlife in Orthodoxy enabled the living to play a role, as their prayers before, during, and even after the funeral could contribute to a favorable divine judgment. The judgment immediately after death (preceding a last judgment at the end of time) included the revelation of the true meaning of a lifetime of deeds to the soul of the departed (2001: p. 24). When the Bolsheviks, a revolutionary political party led by Vladimir Lenin, came to power in Russia in November 1917, they adapted some of these broad structures. Their response to the deaths of major figures included ideas about gaining immortality through the actions of the living and the judgment of deeds shaping one’s final standing. Major differences eclipsed those points of convergence, such as the Bolsheviks’ rejection of the notion of a soul, prayer, and the role of Jesus Christ in the afterlife. The main effort to replace, rather than simply abandon, Orthodox Christian ideas and rituals surrounding death and afterlife emerged with the demise of Lenin, the Bolshevik party founder and Soviet leader, on January 21, 1924. While Lenin’s death affected the country politically and symbolically beyond that of any individual soldier two decades later, his successors’ improvisations would echo into the war era.To mark the national moment of silence preceding his internment, factory sirens, train whistles, and ship’s horns sounded, replacing the church bells used under the old regime. In many respects, the funeral proceeded like that of any Imperial Russian notable, except without any ritual ceremony connected to Lenin’s body (Tumarkin, 1983: pp. 160–164). In place of a specific engagement with the supernatural, Soviet officials declared his immortality as eternal leader as part of a cult of memory aimed at legitimizing his successors’ continued rule (Tumarkin, 1983: p. 135). The syncretic character of the cult had its limits, but references to immortality, the establishment of shrine-like Lenin Corners, and the promotion of pilgrimages to view Lenin’s embalmed corpse directly referenced Orthodox ideas and practices surrounding dead saints (Tumarkin, 1983: p. 2). Following the installation of Lenin’s body in a mausoleum, the state funeral and official media coverage of an Imperial and Red Army general in 1926, Alexei Brusilov, served as a major 138

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Soviet effort at shaping death rituals and afterlives through commemoration. Brusilov’s Tsarist military service and enduring Orthodox faith distinguished him from other Soviet military men. Taking place in an Orthodox cemetery, Brusilov’s funeral highlighted the hybrid possibilities of the official Soviet treatment of death. Along with a mixed Orthodox and military funeral, the top Soviet defense official, Kliment Voroshilov, emphasized Brusilov’s ability to live on in the memory of the Soviet people (Petrone, 2011: pp. 60, 61). While comparable to invocations of Lenin’s continued presence, Voroshilov added the suggestion that citizens would best preserve Brusilov’s memory by serving in the armed forces. Voroshilov’s specific connection of remembrance with military service would provide a core Soviet use of dead war heroes to mobilize new fighters starting in 1941. Further prefiguring the official deployment of dead heroes in wartime, Brusilov served the Soviet state better dead than alive by 1926, as the latter gained primary control over his heroic narrative, both during and after the official mourning period (Petrone, 2011: p. 211). Newspapers served as the primary medium for shaping and promoting the afterlives of Soviet elites. The anniversary of Lenin’s death became the first major day of commemoration in the Soviet year, and marked Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s first photographic appearance in Soviet newspapers every January in the 1930s (Plamper, 2012: pp. 63–64). The Soviet public could regularly read about and see facets of state funerals, which reflected the manner in which citizens of the highest stature received the country’s grandest final honors for their service to the Revolution. In the decade before the war, coverage of such funerals appeared in the flagship national newspaper Pravda, with a photo of Stalin among the pall bearers on nine occasions. The sudden and violent death of high ranking Soviet official Sergei Kirov at the hands of a disgruntled worker holds perhaps the most relevance to wartime (Plamper, 2012: p. 42 op. cit. 252 n. 58). The afterlife of a figure like Kirov began with news coverage, then involved some official direction via a governmental commission for his funeral, and quickly culminated in an afterlife mediated through various artistic commemorations, from paintings and statues to mythologized biographies and mentions in school textbooks (Plamper, 2012: pp. 150, 184). Propagandists would apply a similar process to war heroes at a scale appropriate to their importance and morale-boosting potential. The funerals and news coverage of Lenin, Brusilov, and Kirov reflected the main contours of the evolving post-Orthodox Soviet treatment of death, burial, and afterlife as Soviet culture developed in the 1920s and 1930s. High-level Soviet leaders were simply all men in the decade before the outbreak of war in 1941. The practices and propaganda depictions that emerged in coverage of a male-dominated leadership therefore lacked points of contrast in terms of gender. Women did figure prominently in the press, but as living propaganda heroines.They emerged in various exemplary labor roles alongside the celebration of living Soviet leaders, especially Stalin, but such coverage scarcely engaged questions of death. Indeed, the pronatalism campaigns of the decade promoted motherhood as a public duty, thus associating women with life and the future above all (Chatterjee, 2002: pp. 140–146). While ambiguities remained, the contrasting legal and cultural articulation of military service as an all-male undertaking continued from the Red Army’s founding values of masculine honor and duty (Sanborn, 2003: pp. 144–146).

3  Death and burial on the frontlines The Red Army suffered extraordinary losses in the first two years of fighting, exposing young men to death in greater intimacy and numbers than most could have imagined in civilian life. For those who survived or joined the ranks in 1941 or 1942, the front meant experiencing part of the loss of 2 million Red Army dead and thousands of enemy losses. The Western Front’s half 139

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a million man-strong force alone suffered more than 950,000 irrecoverable losses as reinforcements constantly arrived and thus provided more men to be killed in action, which reached 190.8% of the Front’s listed strength by the end of 1941 (Krivosheev, 1997: pp. 100, 102). While experiences varied for individuals, units, and fronts, the German assault was so wide and persistent to leave no part of the field army untouched in 1941. The chaotic cycle of enemy attacks, Red Army counter attacks, and maneuvers in between continued through 1942 into 1943, although the number of ‘quiet’ sectors grew over time. What stood out alongside the number of dead during that period was the insufficient or non-existent means to bury the Red Army’s fallen. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers continued to die in 1943, and the Red Army remained unable to attend to the resulting burial need properly. President Mikhail Kalinin, who visited troops to shore up morale as a figurehead, heard complaints often enough that he noted: ‘I have written to the Chairmen of the Executive Committees of Soviets asking them to see to it that all common graves are put into proper order’ (Kalinin, 1962: pp. 581, 582). The fact that he learned of the problem despite his distance from army administration and the frontline speaks to how pervasive the problem continued to be. Even after Red Army victories at Stalingrad and Kursk, Soviet officials complained that the Red Army had not improved. An officer explained how the military: shows complete lack of concern for the corpses of the fallen. On the way from Kamensk in the Rostov oblast to Kharkov [approximately 240 miles] I came across many dead Red Army soldiers, whose corpses had been left lying for up to a fortnight by the roadside in mud, ditches and fields. Petrenko, 1943 printed in Acton and Stableford, eds., 2007: pp. 140, 141 Official neglect thus persisted into the fall of 1943, well after the tide of war had turned against Germany, which gave Red Army troops extrinsic motivation to conduct funerals themselves, alongside the desire to honor their fallen comrades. Ignoring the gruesome realities of unburied corpses, dead and wounded heroes drove the propaganda discussion of burial and memorialization throughout 1943. The central newspaper and propaganda source of the Red Army, Krasnaia Zvezda [Red Star], explained that the Red Army’s fallen since 1918 and during the current war ‘educate the soldiers of the Red Army and all Soviet people in the spirit of hatred of the German invaders and confidence in victory,’ but only when they are properly honored and their ‘names burn with glory.’1 Such articles emphasized proper burial and memorial construction only for the most celebrated of fighters, and resonated with the norms that emerged from prewar leaders’ funerals. Subsequent articles, later in 1943, reiterated the theme of honoring certain soldiers for propaganda purposes and ignoring others. Not only did ‘the motherland demand’ such treatment for its heroes, but the propaganda value of memorializing and decorating fallen soldiers would boost the wounded friends of the deceased.2 The most important measure of worth in official rhetoric, Stalin’s fatherly care, applied most of all to heroes: ‘We know that the people will not forget the exploit of [their] son . . . our dear father Comrade Stalin will not leave us.’3 The article explained that biological fathers stood in to receive medals for fallen sons, further emphasizing the father-son connection, as if men alone could appreciate the gravity of the situation, and provide approval for the achievement of manhood. Dead heroes retained their pride of place by earning not only medals, but Stalin’s personal approval, suggesting that Stalin chose his symbolic sons among the elite battle dead, unlike those who fell without a heroic exploit.

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In addition to explaining who received burial honors, propaganda paid some attention to the how of fallen heroes’ burials. In press accounts, the burial process took place without a body to remind readers of the impact of war or as a point of contact for their comrades: ‘The coffin was lowered into the grave. An artillery salute sounded. Close to the [burial] mound men tossed pine and willow branches into a pile.’4 The depiction of troops’ participation in frontline funeral rituals in Krasnaia Zvezda was just as passive: ‘Soldiers stood by a white pyramid, crowned with a Red Army star and a wreath. On it was written: “Platoon Commander Senior Sergeant Grebennikov . . .” ’5 Neither article described an actual body, but instead allowed a coffin or a tombstone to serve as substitute. Both articles ignored the tangible experiences and bodily realities of life and death at the front, and in so doing echoed none of the comradeship and care that reflected masculine soldierly bonds. Official recognition and provision of funeral services and grave markers appeared to be all the acknowledgement heroes ought to expect. Red Army soldiers expressed their dedication to each other in part by first ensuring that dead comrades were secured for burial. While circumstances certainly prevented its realization, members of a combat collective strove to uphold the principle that ‘we never abandoned our wounded or killed’ (Drabkin and Kobylyanskiy, 2009: p. 288). Frontline culture valued reciprocity in most aspects surrounding danger and hardship, and recovery of the dead and wounded figured prominently among those expectations. Red Army men often saw to the proper burial of their fallen even under harsh battle conditions, making clear its significance as a ritual and duty to each other. As one fighter noted in his journal: ‘Grisha Kanevskii died here [at Prokhorova], and we buried him. This happened once the immense battle for the Kursk salient began, which will go down in history.’6 Such dedication to each other revealed the strength of loyalty within combat collectives, but also reflected their exclusive character: troops judged the dispatch of non-combatant orderlies as a dereliction of their duty to one of their own, and uncertain to succeed, given the perceived weaknesses of non-combatant servicemen. In some cases, proper burial required a combat operation, as an infantry squad leader recalled: ‘We buried our comrades on the battlefield. Two of them, Panichev and Endrikhin, were my good friends. . . . Barely having left the village, we faced off with the Germans, [who were] trying to encircle us’ (Chernomordik, 2007: p. 300). Such efforts emphasized soldiers’ willingness to risk their immediate personal safety in order to ensure their dead comrades received a funeral. While funerals reminded men of their own mortality, they were also a time to reflect on how much they had survived, and the nature of their friendship. An infantryman recalled how: I felt especially sorry for him for some reason. Maybe because I did not make it to warn him, or because the last minutes of his life passed right there in front of me. I also could not understand his last words. . . . I saw a lot of death in the war, but that death I remembered especially. Pyl’tsyn, 2003: p. 111 Unlike official rhetoric, troops considered honoring their dead to be a fundamentally local and front specific practice: ‘We had to write all of their data [from their dog tag], and there was a superstition – when you finished writing, it meant that you’d killed him’ (Rogachev, 2007: pp. 341, 342). The surrogate family of the combat collective thus had a duty to perform, which formed part of their sense of brotherhood and collective affiliation. Frontline troops viewed a formal burial service as an honor owed to all fallen comrades, as an expression of their commitment to each other, not just those who died in a medal-worthy

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fashion. The rituals that surrounded comrades’ deaths centered on the body of the fallen. The burial of a comrade followed a relatively consistent pattern, and involved all of his fellows: If there were time, we dressed the body in clean underwear and uniform. We would wrap deceased tankers in piece of tank tarpaulin, and infantry soldiers, as a rule, in their own greatcoats. We lined the bottom of the grave with pine boughs or straw or whatever was available. We carefully lowered the body into the excavated grave, being attentive always to inter from west to east [a popular Christian method].We did not use caskets. Accompanied by a volley of rifle fire or main-gun salvos, we threw the dirt in on top of our comrade and then we installed a simple pyramid with a star. Right there, at the fresh grave, we drank our daily ration of a hundred grams of vodka, in memory of the fallen. And then we returned to battle. Loza, 1998: p. 210 Touch figured prominently in many stages of the burial process, and a physical connection with the deceased’s body served as a key means of showing respect.The process of dressing, wrapping, and lowering a dead comrade involved considerable physical contact with his body, and likely more touch than fighting men would have shared while living. Essentially interrupting the war to prepare the deceased for burial by hand, Red Army soldiers expressed a comradely affiliation on the level of a familial relationship. Touching a non-family member so much served as a further manifestation of affiliation with a group of men who would still be considered strangers or acquaintances after only a few weeks or months of friendship in the civilian world.

4  Gendered heroes and gendered mourning Soviet and Red Army leaders sought to inspire men not just to fight, but to perform heroic exploits and die in pursuit of sacrifices equal in magnitude to the desperate wartime situation. On June 29, 1941, the lead editorial and hero profiles accompanying it on page 2 of Krasnaia Zvezda broke with prewar presentations of ideal Red Army servicemen.The editorial focused on two exploits, the first involving a fighter pilot’s cunning defensive tactics against enemy bombers, and the second on another pilot’s more noteworthy desire to ‘finish the fascist reptile.’ During his fifth mission of the day, the second pilot, Lieutenant Kuz’min, had fired all of his ammunition and been wounded several times. Not willing to leave the battle and allow the enemy to escape, he repeatedly attempted to ram an enemy plane, and on the fourth try, was able to destroy the enemy plane by sacrificing his own. The following paragraph, returning to an editorial tone, explained the importance of such ‘immortal exploits of the heroes of the patriotic war.’ Rather than an isolated incident of extreme self-sacrifice, the editorial explained that ‘the war has only begun. There are still many brutal battles ahead. . . . Struggle with a treacherous enemy requires serious effort and sacrifices.’7 Lieutenant Kuz’min’s feat exemplified the ultimate sacrifice as well as the utmost performance of one’s duty, because he did not immediately retreat once his ammunition ran out, and heroism, by using his plane as a weapon when there were no others on hand. A call for sacrifice immediately following an example of heroic death in battle thus inaugurated the ‘sacrificial defender’ ideal of masculine heroism. Much as Lenin became immortal in culture to preserve the legitimacy of his successors’ government, Lieutenant Kuz’min became immortal to justify the massive loss of subsequent soldiers as heroic and planned. Perhaps the most famous of such cases, the exploit of Captain Gastello first appeared as a brief dispatch on July 6, and then as a proper hero profile discussing his motives on July 10. Gastello, fitting the mold of Lieutenant Kuz’min, and himself emulated in September by Lieutenant 142

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Mamontov, performed a sacrificial exploit with his plane. In battle over enemy territory, enemy fire ignited his plane’s fuel tank. Although he could have ejected with his parachute and survived as a prisoner, Gastello chose instead to ‘end his life neither with a crash nor as a captive, but with an [heroic] exploit,’ and flew his plane into a column of enemy tanks.8 Such active deaths distinguished heroes from other men, presenting fearless devotion to victory as the true measure of a fighter, while the devotion of soldiers who over-valued their lives remained unproven.The growing number of such reports of soldiers dying heroically mentioned no real tactical imperative for them to die fighting, and instead highlighted soldiers’ active choice to die because they were so determined to kill the enemy. The articles highlighted that other options existed, and that the pilots chose death as the best option for the war effort, rather than for themselves as individuals. Such examples of death as an active choice, and death as an act of killing the enemy, also contrasted with the passive deaths of female martyrs, even though both types died as faithful patriots. Even before Soviet partisan Zoia Kosmodemianskaia became the preeminent female icon of the war, female martyrs appeared in soldier-specific propaganda. Captured after setting fire to a German stable, Zoia endured interrogation and torture but refused to give up her partisan detachment. Her captors executed her as a result, and left her dead body in the snow. Found by advancing Red Army forces a short time later, she quickly became a popular sensation (Harris, 2008). Zoia’s story bore considerable resemblance to the one recounted in the article ‘Daughter of a partisan.’ The article reported how a young woman, Tania, refused to provide information about her father’s detachment, and instead attacked her interrogator.The German later executed her, spilling her ‘innocent young blood’ because she would not betray the motherland.9 Krasnaia Zvezda depicted such deaths as tragic, rather than heroic events, which demanded revenge, rather than emulation. In 1942, Soviet propagandists, with Zoia’s mother’s help, elevated Zoia above other female martyr-heroes to create a symbol. She (and the women she overshadowed) personified the people’s war better than battle heroes (Markwick and Cardona, 2012: p. 120), at least for readers on the home front. Much like the pilots who provided a template for battle heroes in 1941, Zoia and women like her symbolized loyal resistance and received praise for choosing martyrdom for the cause over survival. Unlike the pilots, however, they died without inflicting any violence on the enemy. Combined with the broader portrayal of women’s victimization by the enemy, the idealized fatal sacrifices of combatants marked a clear distinction between the deaths of Soviet citizens as active and masculine, or passive and feminine. Outside of specific tragic deaths, articles about events at the front contained frequent references to women suffering the consequences of enemy violence without causing any harm in response.The profile of a soldier noted how he ‘remembered the enemy’s burning of villages, the streets of cities, corpses of women and children, shot like animals.’10 Such deaths seem to have one purpose, to prompt an angry response to the brutal treatment of Soviet civilians. In a medical battalion near the front, ‘Doctors conducted operations and stitched wounds under artillery bombardment. During one such operation a [shell] fragment killed doctor Liberova. They buried her at night. Making a small hillock, they covered their little baby girl.’11 Use of the diminutive familiar form to describe her burial evokes the tragic loss of a loved one, not the problems losing a skilled surgeon would cause for military medical services. The senselessness of her death was typical of such articles, which emphasized victimization instead of a final contribution to victory. At best, women’s passive deaths involved an admirable degree of loyalty to Stalin and the war, but marked feminine figures as unable to defend the country or kill the enemy, thus aiming their message at men as much as at women in military service. The wartime propaganda focused on heroes who performed a final extraordinary exploit, or podvig, had its origins in Russian Orthodoxy, and retained some of those characteristics in the 143

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Soviet wartime usage of the term. An act worthy to be called a podvig demanded some type of suffering or self-sacrifice. In the Russian view of lived Christianity, the podvig rested on ‘denial of “the world,” denial of this mortal life as real life, denial of material force as real force, denial of speech as real speech.’ More than any other, ‘the act of Jesus on the mountain denying the road that led to the empire of the world in favor of the road that led to an ignoble death is a podvig – denial of the world’ (Graham, 1915: p. 111). Their motives were radically different, but the actions of soldier heroes involved choosing suffering and denying life and survival as dishonorable in favor of death. Of course, the similarities have clear limits, since Red Army soldiers’ objectives were decidedly of the world, and victory after their deaths did not equal a heavenly reward. Perhaps most importantly, soldier-specific propaganda did not consider a passive death to be a podvig. Unlike Christian martyrdom, a combat podvig demanded destruction of the enemy as a consequence of the hero’s death. The combat deaths of other soldiers became an inescapable reality of frontline service for all Red Army troops who themselves survived the first battles. A central element of soldiers’ definition of heroism was a comrade’s willingness to take a risk for the good of his men. An artillerist emphasized this criterion when he explained his commander’s heroic death during an encirclement battle at Stalingrad: We were together in the battery when he decided to counter-attack against the larger number of German tanks using anti-tank rifles and several grenades. He alone stood to use the anti-tank weapons and I gave him ammunition. Only his resistance gave [the rest of] us a chance to stay alive.12 Selflessness and concern for comrades figured prominently in such accounts, as those qualities reflected a commitment to the combat collective. While the latter was compatible with the war effort as an alternate affiliation, it produced different heroic ideals and reasons for self-sacrifice. Another fighter explained how ‘his best fighting friend’ reacted to being mortally wounded in fighting off a tank assault: ‘He spoke little and when I asked him how he was feeling, he answered that it was nothing and added “take this ammunition for your machine gun, you’ll need them, and I will only leave them behind.” ’13 While the letter focused on the aftermath of his combat action, it shows the centrality of putting comrades before oneself to soldiers’ definition of heroic death. In each case, comrades saw sacrifice for each other as heroic, rather than praise their devotion to the national cause or Stalin’s paternal leadership. The logic of Red Army soldiers’ responses to death becomes clear with Tony Walter’s further insight that mourning typically follows two paths, in which ‘the living must leave the dead behind and move on without them’ or ‘the dead are always with us and the bereaved continue to bond with them’ (Walter, 1999: p. 205). Mourning of the dead was not universal at the front, and those who died dishonorably received little attention or commemoration. In fact, larger numbers of soldiers received no such commemoration, because ‘the highest losses were always among the green, untried soldiers’ (Yakushin, 2005: p. 94). The difference appears clearly in an artilleryman’s memoir treatment of losses in two consecutive battles after the Kursk operation. The loss of unknown replacements barely received mention: ‘The Germans had destroyed two self-propelled guns from our regiment and a heavy one from Gromov’s regiment.’ In contrast, lost comrades appeared in full: ‘Guys on my old crew had been killed: the gun-layer Valeriy Korolev, the driver Vanya, Gerasimov, and the gun-loader Kolya Sviridov. Some of the vehicle commanders had died too: among them Sasha Minin, Mikolay Samoilov, and Vanya Tomin,’ while the death of his closest friend among them prompted ‘bitter grief ’ (Krysov, 2010: pp. 164, 180, 181). Such a reaction fit the dynamics of small group cohesion, as the new men had not 144

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survived long enough to earn equal status in their unit’s combat collective (Rush, 2001: pp. 312– 319).Their deaths therefore provoked no personal feelings of loss among survivors, and therefore no reason to engage in collective acts of remembrance. The other type of loss that warranted no mourning or commemoration from veterans was death through incompetence or carelessness. Unsurprisingly, this often involved replacement troops, as a machine-gunner observed while being redeployed after Kursk in mid-1943: While we were on the way [to the front], about 20 men from our train died – everywhere around us was filled with landmines. One character, a sailor, detached a bounding mine. How did he manage it?! What a blockhead! A bunch of young inexperienced onlookers gathered around him: “Look here,” he said, “it will jump up, I’ll catch it and it won’t explode.” It jumped up and exploded. His arm was torn off and intestines fell out. Drabkin and Kobylyanskiy, 2009: p. 285 Death from carelessness or incompetence, when combat inevitably took men who fought well and had saved their comrades in the past, was not something Red Army fighters took time to mourn. Soldiers considered such deaths neither tragic nor a real loss to their unit, unless they harmed fighters within the combat collective. Troops joining veteran units had to earn the right to be respected and remembered by comrades, and those who died before doing so faded away namelessly. Veterans’ willingness to ignore or downplay the deaths of soldiers who did not measure up echoed the propaganda treatment of reserving funerals for the worthy, but represented one part of a more realistic spectrum of frontline conduct in combat collectives. Among Red Army fighting men, women’s deaths proved more noteworthy for reasons quite separate from either propaganda accounts or their interpretation of the loss of male comrades. The significance of the loss of a woman, whether or not she was a combatant, had little to do with her success at the front. As an artilleryman recalled: I didn’t even have time to shout “Get down!” to her, when she was hit and fell. . . . It was painful to see this cute girl, who was only about 18 years of age, and my heart was breaking over the injustice of what had just happened – having had no time to live her own life fully. Moments later, the same soldier recalled, his self-propelled gun advanced at the enemy: As we moved to catch up with the lines of the attacking rifle battalion, we could see that the entire field was strewn with corpses: the [Red Army] infantry had begun to incur terrible losses from the very first minutes of the attack. They had been simply mowed down in the open field by explosions, shell fragments, and machine-gun bursts. Krysov, 2010: pp. 184, 185 The artilleryman juxtaposed similar deaths, all resulting from the enemy’s effective resistance in one battle, in terms of the emotional impact of seeing them die, the battlefield justice of how they died, and their afterlives in memory. The death of the cute girl prompted an emotional response and immediate thoughts of the civilian life she ought to have enjoyed (whether after or instead of serving at the front). Her symbolic afterlife centered on the injustice of war but had little impact on how soldiers fought or thought about battle. Such remembrance of Red Army women’s deaths differed from the significance of the nameless riflemen who died in a pointless 145

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frontal assault that highlighted officers’ callousness, or the real comrades who fought effectively but died sacrificially to remain in collective remembrance. Male soldiers more often linked women’s deaths to their supposedly real roles in the civilian pre- or postwar realm rather than to lethal combat realities at the front. Lost civilian opportunities also came to mind when soldiers faced the burials of female soldiers without seeing them fall in battle. An infantry sergeant remembered a similar reaction to the above-mentioned artilleryman’s among his comrades: “Natasha from Krasnaia Presnia,” who was generally considered the best-looking of all the female snipers, slipped as she was descending a slope down into the trenches and tumbled downward. Just before she reached the trench, a burst of automatic fire caught her. A bullet penetrated her right shoulder and buried itself in her chest. Everyone turned out for her funeral. Her friends sobbed without embarrassment. We all tried our best to comfort them. I can recall no other occasion at the front when anyone offered someone else so much consolation. They loved Natasha in the team, praised her beauty, and thought she had a promising future in the movies or the theater. The young woman herself was thinking about something completely different; she dreamed of getting married and quickly having three children. Gorbachevsky, 2008: p. 339 Each woman’s death garnered significant attention despite her unsuccessful performance in battle. Instead, men focused on the pleasing appearance of the deceased and the tragedy of their unlived postwar life.There was no discussion of comradeship, fighting skills, or revenge.There was no sense of a shared bond of hardship, vulnerability, and loss, but of injustice, as if a woman’s death ought not to happen, even in wartime, and thus affected servicemen who lacked a battle-forged connection to the deceased. Such women would not live on in collective remembrances of how to fight, or why the enemy must be destroyed, but as reminders of the tragedy of war. Reactions to women’s deaths thus resembled the loss of loved ones in the rear more than the mourning of male comrades.

5  Constructing wartime afterlives Most of the work to produce afterlives for dead soldiers appeared in writing to and from the front. The nature of war on the Eastern Front limited burials and made spontaneous shrines virtually impossible to create as folklore scholar Jack Santino defines them, in part, as sites that ‘insert and insist upon the presence of absent people. They display death in the heart of social life. These are not graves awaiting occasional visitors and sanctioned decoration’ (Santino, 2006: p. 13). In fact, visitors and graves were more than troops could expect. Early in 1942, comrades’ deaths prompted soldiers to respond simply, with emphasis on remembrance, as one pilot explained to his comrade’s mother in February: ‘Rozhin died heroically, our unit will preserve his memory.’14 Another infantryman focused on the shared experience and pain of loss: ‘we lived like brothers, ate and drank from one bowl and I could not stop from crying when I saw my comrade had died.’15 Red Army troops’ desire to write greater and greater numbers of condolence letters in response to comrades’ deaths speaks to the continued development of a frontline culture rooted in their everyday experiences and the constant issue of their mortality. The bonds formed between comrades could not be replaced as easily as units could be reinforced, and the surviving veterans of 1942 saw their ranks shrink the next year, leading a 24-year-old tank commander to report to his mother: ‘I am already the old man in the brigade.’16 The impact of the sudden loss continued to make death and loss the sole focus of many 146

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letters home and displaced any discussion of conditions there. One soldier recalled the tragic scene of his comrade’s death: How Grisha cried and asked me to pass on a letter. . . . My heart hurts, I want to cry, but I will not cry, because the Hitlerites will not rejoice about this, we will [instead] leave the Hitlerites to cry.17 Developed while risking and expecting death, and prone to ending suddenly, such friendships evolved into a sense of duty that extended beyond death during desperate months of survival at the front. Appearance of such promises in personal letters suggests that death and mourning became part of a new sense of personal duty that men felt that they had to carry out, but women in the rear could only read about secondhand.18 Red Army men continued to discuss with family the pain and anger that accompanied their comrades’ deaths in battle, but their responses to death at the front also began to evolve. Red Army troops’ new mid-war willingness to discuss the death and danger that faced them at the front was more than a reflection of the intensity of combat and emerged as part of a new sense of masculine duty towards their comrades, rather than family or the nation alone. The connections soldiers shared in life and death at the front led them to think of their units as a masculine community, and they spoke of their closest comrades as brothers, for whom proper burial was as much a duty as heroism: ‘I buried him myself and did a decent job as a beloved friend, [because] this was my foremost friend, and we even called each other brothers.’19 Soldiers used the terms of brother and family to describe the burial of the fallen as the highest honor and level of comradeship that existed at the front. One Red Army man expressed the connection of comradeship and the possibility of death (which the death of so many comrades had made real) in a letter home: I, after all, will also have no one to tell, if I return from war unharmed, about all of the frightful meetings with Germans, about tank attacks, when fire came from every direction, metal and death, about the dances and songs of tank men in minutes of rest, about the touching friendship of battle comrades.20 Soldiers’ afterlives seemed fully intelligible only to other combatants, as relatives could only imagine their loved ones in the ranks as they had been in civilian life. Frontline condolence letters became a central means for soldiers to assert their duty to not only remember, but also to avenge the fallen. Such letters linked past and future, as one vowed to ‘strike at the fascist vermin, taking revenge on them for my friend Lesha,’ after explaining the deceased was his ‘best friend that I trained with and knew for three years.’21 Another soldier wrote to his brother, fighting on another part of the front, about women’s requests for revenge in response to his letters: Mothers, wives in every letter ask me to take revenge on bloody Hitler for the deaths of their only sons, whom the Germans have taken from her forever. I think you are right to take revenge for her sons, as you have described.22 Another specifically contrasted his response to that of his dead comrade’s girlfriend: I have one piece of advice for you: take it like a man . . . you mourn his death, and we at the front answer with our battle successes in the task of destroying the German occupiers, and will ferociously and mercilessly take revenge.23 147

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Such letters express an understanding of different responses and different obligations for the female relatives and male comrades of a dead fighter. The contrast of request and action, of grief and motivation, underscores a conventional gender binary in the writing and thinking of Red Army troops. While an elaboration of the assertion of fighting and killing as a masculine duty, revenge provided a novel claim to certain masculine relationships as more responsive and more meaningful alternatives to the traditional familial and romantic bonds of mothers and girlfriends. This new self-imposed sense of duty to the dead inspired hatred of the enemy and motivated soldiers to kill, as Abdulin’s confession at the outset makes clear, and allowed troops to care for one another in death, since doing so in life lay outside of their control. A lieutenant who volunteered for the front explained the power of fighters’ response to the torture and killing of comrades: Yesterday I buried eight men (corpses) of our tortured soldiers and commanders. . . . Such are the actions of the enemy. . . . Every comrade who saw this with his own eyes or whom we told about it has vowed to take revenge.24 Beyond the hatred and motivation, this duty of revenge seemed to provide soldiers with some consolation, as they feared for their own lives. An Azerbaijani soldier expressed this combination of revenge and fear as he discussed the context of his writing: In this evening’s battle alone, we lost seven. Two of our soldiers have been posthumously awarded [the rank of] Hero of the Soviet Union. We will avenge our friends. Miastan, I write this letter to you after battle in the moonlight. Every minute death awaits. God forbid, if I die, don’t grieve too much.25 Troops’ emphasis on revenge for comrades served as an extension of the afterlives they began creating with condolence letters in general. By deserving vengeance, fallen soldiers continued to matter to their combat collectives beyond death and warranted more communication to their loved ones at home. Those individuals a unit or fellow soldier vowed to avenge became symbols of what their unit could endure and the certainty of their eventual triumph. By remaining linked to their unit, they remained at the front and remained part of the struggle, rather than enter the civilian realm of impotent, feminine grief. Revenge appeared in official rhetoric as something women did not seek or carry out. For women at home, male relatives appeared as the main connection they had to the frontline reality of war, as was the case with the title character,‘Katia,’ in a short story by officially celebrated author Alexei Tolstoy. Upon receiving official notification that her brother was missing and presumed dead at the front, she ‘read and re-read’ the letter, ‘quietly cried into a pillow’ and ‘the next day she went to the military committee. They sent her to the front as a medic.’26 Although the story ends happily with a frontline reunion between sister and not-dead brother, at no point does revenge or even hatred of the enemy enter her thoughts or motivate her actions. She simply ‘felt the war’ and resolved to play a greater role, but took no violent action against the enemy. Female figures like Katia appeared in soldier-specific propaganda as having men fight and die for them, but neither sought revenge directly or even tried to harm the enemy. Such depictions of women as loyal but passive patriots reinforced the idea that death only motivated men to seek vengeance.

6 Conclusions Official culture presented soldiers’ agency as a function of their choice of active death, as a final act of commitment to the war effort or national cause. This official effort, and its limits, fit the 148

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pattern that Winter identified, whereby: ‘those who hold power always try to construct a narrative of the past legitimizing their authority. But their voices are never the only ones engaged in acts of remembrance’ (Winter, 2006: p. 277). Frontline troops, whose experience of combat would quickly diminish or destroy any idea of agency regarding how they or their comrades lived and died, asserted agency in response to the death taking place all around them. I situate soldiers’ improvised funerals with specific rituals for their comrades as the means by which fighting men mourned each other’s deaths as long as they met local soldierly norms, which downplayed sacrificial enemykilling heroics. Their funerals showed care for the bodies of the fallen, which was otherwise an uncertain prospect. Red Army fighters saw funerals as an opportunity to show respect and express feelings as much as a duty to be carried out. In so doing, I challenge Catherine Merridale’s contentions that troops had no real chance to bury their own, did not experience trauma, and remained silent about such experiences (Merridale, 2001: pp. 234, 251, 252). Families could not participate alongside comrades at their relatives’ funerals, which increased soldiers’ sense of isolation from home at the same time it strengthened the masculine bonds of their combat collectives. Women remained largely outside such selective groupings despite their growing presence at the front, and even when they filled combat roles. While Red Army men generally tolerated women’s presence at the front and participation in combat, their reactions to women’s deaths reveal attitudes that fell short of real acceptance. My reading of men’s reactions challenges historian Anna Krylova’s argument that frontline experiences of women’s deaths led to a ‘destabilization of the unquestionable status of conventional gender segregation of combat,’ with male soldiers’ ‘moving back and forth between competing visions of the combatant identity’ (Krylova, 2010: pp. 189, 203). Soldiers’ response to death continued beyond funerals to the afterlives they helped create for their comrades by writing condolence letters to comrades’ families. They could exercise agency over the narrative of the lost comrades’ front lives, and thus linked front family and natural family groups in remembrance and mourning. As with funerals, the condolence letters allowed soldiers to imagine a degree of predictability, if not agency, over their own fate, as the norms they established for dead comrades were what they could expect to follow their own deaths.The care that both acts, burial and writing, entailed also helped provide some sense that their war service and death had value beyond official definitions of a heroic death, as the funeral and condolence letters provided a degree of connection to peacetime expectations and familial belongings. In the final phase of their establishment of frontline culture in combat collectives, soldiers responded to death by seeking revenge against the enemy.The most obvious assertion of agency in response to death, the promise and taking of revenge, helped fighting men diminish the sense of powerlessness over their own and their comrades’ survival at the front. To a greater degree than funerals and condolence letters, revenge operated as a uniquely front-based and largely male response to wartime death. Troops could symbolically extend the value of comrades’ contributions to victory, or diminish the loss of that death, by claiming their death as motivation to fight more fiercely. Such a perspective might also serve as personal reassurance that death would not mean failure as a soldier, which propaganda suggested by omission of examples of soldiers who fought well but did not die in a blaze of glory.When the enemy cut down a female soldier, male troops did not react to a fallen comrade, but a woman robbed of a feminine destiny outside war. Combatants could not redeem such a loss through revenge on the enemy, because they would not be striking a similar blow in return. The afterlives of Red Army women thus served as tragic reminders of the war’s impact on the country, instead of the local totem of vengeance that a slain male comrade provided. These three frontline approaches to burial, mourning, and constructing afterlives served as an alternative Soviet perspective on wartime death, linked to the official Soviet narrative through 149

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shared masculine ideals and values. As Tony Walter suggests about religious cultures, the evolution of spontaneous beliefs about death and the afterlife are not typically directed against formal teachings (Walter, 2016: p. 19). Frontline culture developed in response to Red Army troops’ experiences and the norms that developed around them. While soldier-specific propaganda had limited influence, core elements of prewar Soviet (and pre-Soviet Orthodox) ideas and rituals continued to resonate at the front, and most troops remained loyal to the war effort while facing the possibility of death. Key words: Red Army, Russia, soldier death, frontline culture, military death

Notes 1 ‘The Glory of Fallen Warriors,’ Krasnaia Zvezda, 1 April 1943, 3. 2 ‘The Decoration of Wounded and Killed Soldiers,’ Krasnaia Zvezda, 10 July 1943, 1. 3 ‘The Transfer of the Orders of the Patriotic War to Killed Warriors’ Families’ Krasnaia Zvezda 16 October 1943, 3. 4 ‘The Death of Private Malinin,’ Krasnaia Zvezda, 16 February 1944, 2. 5 ‘The Grave of a Guards Soldier,’ Krasnaia Zvezda, 16 April 1942, 3. 6 Journal Entry of Dmitrii I. Gingleev 7 July 1943 RGASPI Fond M-33 Opis 1 Delo 661 List 6 7 ‘Lieutenant Kuz’min,’ Krasnaia Zvezda, 29 June 1941, 1. 8 ‘Captain Gastello,’ Krasnaia Zvezda, 10 July 1941, 2. 9 ‘Daughter of a Partisan,’ Krasnaia Zvezda, 3 October 1941, 4. 10 ‘Senior Lieutenant Volkov,’ Krasnaia Zvezda, 5 July 1941, 3. 11 They Covered their Little Baby Girl: прикрепили дочещку. ‘Medical battalion,’ Krasnaia Zvezda, 16 September 1941, 2. 12 Letter from Anatolii to wife of Ivan V. Bulatov 20 April 1943. RGASPI Fond M-33 Opis 1 Delo 242 List 12. 13 Letter from M. Rybakov to wife of Sergei A. Aksenovskii April 1943. RGASPI Fond M-33 Opis 1 Delo 576 List 7. 14 RGASPI Fond M-33 Opis 1 Delo 395 List 6, 9. 15 Letters of V. M. Shashkin and Petr I. Kazantsev to mother of Evgenii Ia. Kuz’min 22 July and 25 September 1943. RGASPI Fond M-33 Opis 1 Delo 53 Listy 101, 104–105. 16 Letter from Aleksandr A. Kosmodemianskii to his mother, 14 February 1944. RGASPI M-33 Opis 7 Delo 650 List 97. 17 Letter from Aleksei F. Avtunich to his sister, 8 April 1943. RGASPI M-33 Opis 1 Delo 193 List 1. 18 Soldiers wrote such letters voluntarily, in addition to the literally fill-in-the-blanks official notification card. 19 Letter of Sgt. Dorokhin to the sister of Fedor A. Ermolenko 24 February 1944 RGASPI Fond M-33 Opis 1 Delo 107 List 3 20 RGASPI Fond M-33 Opis 1 Delo 62 List 189. 21 Letter from Andrei to wife of Aleksei T. Kuz’menko 29 March 1944. RGASPI Fond M-33 Opis 1 Delo 699 List 1. 22 Letter between soldier brothers, Petr to Arkadii Mankov 16 July 1943. RGASPI Fond M-33 Opis 1 Delo 850 List 2. 23 ‘у меня будем один Вам совет: мужайтесь.’ Letter from unnamed comrade to girlfriend of Aleksandr S. Koshman. RGASPI Fond M-33 Opis 1 Delo 1386 List 84. 24 RGASPI Fond M-33 Opis 1 Delo 99 List 1–2. 25 RGASPI Fond M-33 Opis 1 Delo 1429–3 List 1. 26 ‘Katia,’ Krasnaia Zvezda, 1 May 1943, 3.

Further reading Berkhoff, K. (2012) Motherland in Danger. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. The first monograph-length study of Soviet wartime print propaganda, which focuses heavily on depictions of violence, atrocities, and death.

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Deaths and afterlives in the Red Army Guillory, S. (2012) ‘The Shattered Self of Komsomol Civil War Memoirs,’ Slavic Review, 71(3), pp. 546–565. An insightful article that engages core issues of veterans’ examination of the self in war memoirs and how such efforts engaged and challenged official narratives about death and heroism. Peri, A. (2017) The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. A thorough analysis of wartime diaries in besieged Leningrad, where death from starvation and cold, as much as enemy attack, caused Soviet citizens to reevaluate their loyalties and motives. Reese, R. (2014) ‘Ten Jewish Red Army Veterans of the Great Patriotic War,’ Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 27(3), pp. 420–429. A methodological article that considers central questions of sources and representativeness in researching individual and national experiences of war and death. Sella, A. (1992) The Value of Human Life in Soviet Warfare. London: Routledge. A detailed examination of the Red Army’s standards for acceptable losses and reduction of combat deaths over the course of the Second World War.

Bibliography Abdulin, M. (2004) Red Road From Stalingrad: Recollections of a Soviet Infantryman. Barnsley: Pen and Sword Books. Acton, E. and Stableford, T. (eds). (2007) The Soviet Union: A Documentary History.Volume 2. Exeter: Exeter University Press. Alonso,A. (1994) ‘The Politics of Space,Time, and Substance,’ Annual Review of Anthropology, 23, pp. 379–405. Chatterjee, C. (2002) Celebrating Women: Gender, Festival Culture, and Bolshevik Ideology, 1910–1939. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Chernomordik, M. (2007) in: Drabkin, A. (ed). Ia dralsia s pantservaffe [We Fought against the Panzer Forces]. Moscow: Iauza, pp. 268–301. Drabkin, W. and Kobylyanskiy, I. (2009) Red Army Infantrymen Remember the Great War: A Collection of Interviews with 16 Soviet WW-2 Veterans. Edited by T. Marvin. Bloomington: Authorhouse. Frierson, C. (2015) Silence was Salvation: Child Survivors of Stalin’s Terror and World War II in the Soviet Union. New Haven:Yale University Press. Gorbachevsky, B. (2008) Through the Maelstrom: A Red Army Soldier’s War on the Eastern Front, 1942–1945. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Graham, S. (1915) The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary. New York: The Macmillan Company. Harris, A. (2008) The Myth of the Woman Warrior in World War II in Soviet Culture. PhD Thesis, University of Kansas. Kalinin, M. (1962) ‘Speech at a Discussion with Agitators Working at the Front,’ in: Kalinin, M. (ed). O Kommunisticheskom Vospitanii i voinskom dolge [On Communist Education and Soldiers’ Duty]. Moscow: Partizdat, pp. 581–584. Krylova, A. (2010) Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Krivosheev, G. (1997) Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the 20th Century. London: Greenhill Books. Krysov,V. (2010) Panzer Destroyer. Memoirs of a Red Army Tank Commander. Barnsley: Pen and Sword. Loza, D. (1998) Fighting for the Soviet Motherland: Recollections from the Eastern Front. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Markwick, R. and Cardona, E. (2012) Soviet Women on the Frontline in the Second World War. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Merridale, C. (2001) Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth Century Russia. New York: Viking Penguin. Petrone, K. (2011) The Great War in Russian Memory. Bloomington: Indianan University Press. Plamper, J. (2012) The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power. New Haven:Yale University Press. Pyl’tsyn, A. (2003) Shtrafnoi Udar [Penalty Strike]. Moscow: Znanie. Robert, R. (2001) Hell in Hürtgen Forest:The Ordeal and Triumph of an American Infantry Regiment. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Rogachev, A. (2007) in Drabkin, A. (ed). Ia dralsia s pantservaffe [We Fought against the Panzer Forces]. Moscow: Iauza, pp. 302–349.

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Steven G. Jug Roper, M. (2009) The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Sanborn, J. (2003) Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–1925. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Santino, J. (2006) ‘Performative Commemoratives: Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death,’ in: Santino, J. (ed). Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 5–15. Tumarkin, N. (1983) Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Walter, T. (1996) The Eclipse of Eternity: A Sociology of the Afterlife. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Walter, T. (1999) On Bereavement:The Culture of Grief. Facing Death. Buckingham: Open University Press. Walter, T. (2016) ‘The Dead Who Become Angels: Bereavement and Vernacular Religion,’ Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 73(1), pp. 3–28. Winter, J. (2006) Remembering War:The Great War Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century. New Haven:Yale University Press. Yakushin, I. (2005) On the Roads of War: A Soviet Cavalryman on the Eastern Front. Barnsley: Pen and Sword. Zimakov,V. (2009) In Drabkin, A. (ed). Red Army Infantrymen Remember the Great War: A Collection of Interviews with 16 Soviet WW-2 Veterans. Bloomington: Authorhouse.

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13 CORPSES THAT PREACH Óscar Romero and the martyred priests of El Salvador Mandy Rodgers-Gates

1 Introduction Opening the clear glass door to enter the museum at the Centro Monseñor Romero in San Salvador, one feels a blast of cool air and notes the tomb-like quiet inside.The cool air and quiet contrast with the heavy heat and bustle of the city surrounding the campus of the Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas (UCA), where the Centro is located. It feels as though you have entered a sacred space, a place set apart. Your eyes are drawn to a colorful painting, prominently placed in the front of the large room that makes up the museum, so that you cannot walk through the front door without facing it. The colors belie the theme of the painting: a bishop lies dead, identified by his mitre1 – cruelly inverted as his head hangs back. He seems to be floating on air, or upheld by hands unseen. He is surrounded by a mixed group: some sad and prayerful; a soldier sullen and angry; another bishop oblivious, back turned as he looks instead to a cross.You have not been in El Salvador long, but you instantly recognize who the dead bishop, dressed in white, represents: Monseñor Óscar Romero. Just beyond this two-dimensional memorial lie displays filled with less abstract and more bodily remembrances of the dead. In the center: the bloodied clothing of the six Jesuit priests killed in November 1989 on the UCA campus.2 This clothing hangs suspended in the air in glass cases, invoking the ghostlike presence of the dead. The boxer shorts of one – all he was wearing at the time he was killed. The robe and house slippers of another. Reminders that these men were caught unawares, massacred as the day ended and they prepared for sleep.The stains of blood and other bodily fluids are visible . . . because death is not clean, especially brutal deaths such as these. Along one wall of the museum you find a few window boxes in the shape of a cross. The boxes are lit, and through the glass pane of each you see a small jar. Each jar contains a little bit of dirt or dried grass – resembling a tiny bundle of hay – and each one has a name. Six jars, six names. The soil and grass upon which the blood of the six Jesuits spilled, preserved here as sacred earth. Portraits of the dead, the clothing they wore, the place they were killed – these are just a few of the ways the victims of violence are remembered in El Salvador. Remembering them this way, they are made more than victims. Their deaths are given sacred significance that lends the dead a moral weight, in turn calling for a particular moral response in the present by the living. These memorials and the narratives they evoke simultaneously re-interpret the past and 153

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lay a path for the present. In this chapter, I examine the martyred dead of El Salvador as they are interpreted through their bodies, the location of their death, and their communities. In each section I look to present and past, briefly surveying current examples of El Salvador’s memorializing of Romero and other victims of violence, while highlighting the path Romero charted in his interpretation of the martyred dead. Six priests were killed during Romero’s three years as archbishop (February 1977– March 1980). Throughout the chapter I examine his commentary on the dead priests’ bodies, their location in space, and connection to communities. I demonstrate Romero’s narration of the priests as martyrs who display simultaneously the unjust actions of the persecutors as well as the priests’ own virtue. In doing so, Romero re-interpreted the violence, refuting the government and media’s interpretation, and offering the martyrs as models for the living, models who should be imitated. Romero defended the character of the victim by interpreting the dead body, itself – the corpse’s placement and location at the time of death, the facial expressions of the body, and/or the damage done to the body, in addition to the community gathered around the corpse. I argue that Romero’s interpretation of the violence perpetrated and of the victim-martyr are mutually reinforcing: the victim can only be seen as a martyr if the violence is unjustified and indefensible, and the violence can only be seen as unjustified if the victim’s character can be proven. This proof of character for Romero, and for the church after Romero, centers on the priest’s imitation of Jesus and unity with the church. These can be displayed through a number of actions or virtues: humility, courage in the face of death, forgiveness of enemies, and preaching of nonviolence. In each section I will point to ways bodies, geography, and communities become witnesses both to the unjustified violence of the authorities and to the self-justifying character of the victims.

2  Bodies: ‘A cadaver, like a man with his face lifted to heaven’ The dead may be dead, but they are not entirely without agency. In his study on the ‘work’ the dead do, historian Thomas Laqueur demonstrates that particular metaphysical and religious beliefs are not necessary for the dead to do significant social work. In a thoroughly ‘disenchanted’ situation such as the modern West, we still imbue dead bodies with meaning (Laqueur, 2015). However, it is also the case that the particular kind of agency the dead have is shaped to a greater or lesser degree by the belief system undergirding it – in addition to other social, historical, political, and cultural factors. Regarding corpses, specifically, Robert Bartlett points out, ‘Of all religions, Christianity is the one most concerned with dead bodies’ (2013: p. 3). The bodies of the martyrs and saints in particular have long held significance and power in the Christian tradition, and the body of Óscar Romero is no exception. His body has been moved multiple times, his organs removed, and now, various bodily relics have been stored in an inset in the floor of his former home. While the treatment of Romero’s body has always been reverent, due to his status as archbishop of El Salvador, the political circumstances have often dictated the outward form that reverence takes. The transfer of his body in March 1992 from a side chapel where he had been originally buried (with haste, due to violence breaking out at his funeral) to the basement of the cathedral took place among a small group, with a somber ceremony but little fanfare. At that point, Romero’s legacy was still debated and the recently agreed-to peace still fragile.The movement of his body in March 2005 to its current spot within the basement, immediately below the altar, garnered a greater celebration as his beatification was assumed to be on the horizon. His funeral itself was no normal event: tens of thousands gathered on the plaza outside the cathedral, and – in that politically tense moment – violence erupted. More than thirty people 154

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died that day in the confusion of explosions, bullets, and mourners rushing for cover. The presence of mourners around this body was threatening to the authorities, and they had been fearful of the ways the gathering might be used to further the purposes of the opposition.3 Romero’s body continues to be revered not only in its corporeal presence, but beginning in April 2005, also via a bronze sculpture forever capturing the form of his likeness and lying at rest in the cathedral crypt. This sculpture by Italian artist Paolo Borghi includes several significant symbols such as the palm of the martyrs and the staff of a bishop. Perhaps none more striking, and less traditional, though is a red jade stone in the shape of a ball that seems to crack open the skin of bronze covering Romero’s heart. These cracks distinctly form a cross. The bullet that exploded upon entering Romero’s body has been transformed into a precious red stone representing eternal life, cutting a cross into Romero’s body. Tools of death changed by the act of martyrdom and by the memorial itself reflect signs of resurrection and hope. In another sense, though, the presence of this red stone disallows forgetting the manner of Romero’s death: the deadly accuracy of the bullet and the way it tore into his body. The permanent form of Romero’s body lies there as an accusation against the perpetrators – perpetrators still not brought to justice.4 This double witness of Romero’s tomb mirrors the way in which Romero used the bodies of the dead to testify: first, to the hope they had, even in death, due to their faith and virtue, and second, to the unjust violence perpetrated against them. While he was alive, Romero, himself, invoked the bodies of the dead to re-narrate the violence for his listeners at funeral and memorial services. In one of the most controversial funerals of the priests’ deaths in El Salvador, that of Fr. Ernesto (‘Neto’) Barrera, Romero cautioned against blindly accepting the reports in the media – that Fr. Neto was in an armed confrontation, alongside other leftist ‘guerrilla’ fighters. He used a report on Neto’s body as evidence for his argument: [The Church] has named an investigative commission for these deaths; and we are collecting facts, indicators that contradict, categorically, much of the scandalous news from our newspapers and radio stations. Neto Barrera was flogged. There is a document on Neto Barrera, written by a forensic doctor, that reveals terrible torture. Neto Barrera must have suffered a lot before delivering his spirit up to the judgment of the Lord. It is not right, then, that a dead man is judged with biased, earthly criteria [when he] can no longer speak nor can he complain of the pains they inflicted on him. emphasis added; Romero, 2005–2009: pp. 443, 4445 Here we see the two-sided reality of the dead as both silent and speaking. The dead can no longer defend their reputation, nor cry out from the pain that has been inflicted upon them. In this way, Romero implicitly called and calls attention to the silencing that such violence is meant to inflict – a point he makes less subtly on other occasions. At the same time, the bodies of the dead speak, and the very wounds inflicted against them can be used against those seeking to slander the dead. The narrative of torture spoken by the body does not cohere with the story of armed confrontation given by the authorities. Romero uses the corpse and its markers of violence to disrupt the narrative promoted by those in power. In the same sermon quoted above, Romero spoke to the hope of the church, and saw that hope in Fr. Neto’s tortured corpse: And it is here, a cadaver, like a man with his face lifted to heaven, the image of a Church that does not end at death, that is on pilgrimage and walks beyond the grave; it is the man that enters into eternity.6 155

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The corpse has agency in Romero’s telling. Fr. Neto’s body does not simply lie dead: his face is lifted to heaven, and in lying dead, he directs the eyes of those present to heaven. For Romero, Fr. Neto represented the entirety of the church awaiting that hope, and Romero subtly tightened the connection between Fr. Neto and the church as a whole – particularly important in the case of Fr. Neto and the (allegedly) suspicious circumstances of his death. In other situations, Romero drew attention not only to the body as a whole, but also to specific parts of the body – usually the parts of the body most damaged by violence. So, in the case of Alfonso Navarro, killed in May 1977, Romero repeatedly emphasized Alfonso’s mouth.7 In Navarro’s funeral sermon, Romero claimed to draw a message from Fr. Alfonso, from his mouth ‘disfigured by bullets.’8 In another sermon a few days later in honor of the Virgin of Fátima, around the theme of practicing penitence and prayer, Romero offered Fr. Alfonso as an example of these practices, even at his moment of death: [W]hen a woman who recovered him from the pool of blood asked him: “Father, what hurts?” he said: “What hurts me is the sin that they have committed against me, but I forgive those who kill me; and what hurts me are my (own) sins, I ask God for forgiveness.” And he started praying with those lips totally destroyed by the bullets, until [the moment] he dies praying and asking for forgiveness.9 In recounting Fr. Alfonso’s final moments, Romero demonstrated Fr. Navarro’s religious hope and virtuous character in his ability to forgive his killers, even as he lay dying. He offered Fr. Alfonso to listeners as an example of the penitence to which they are also called. Most of his listeners would know that Navarro would be viewed as imitating Jesus himself in the hour of his death: ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’10 Romero narrated Navarro’s imitation of Jesus in a way that emphasizes the damage done to Navarro’s body: lying in a pool of blood, with disfigured mouth and lips. The body and final acts of the slain priest point to both the transcendent hope of the church and the sin of those who would commit such acts. The connecting point between hope on one side and injustice on the other frames the character of the priest. The Salvadoran people can trust in Fr. Alfonso’s entrance into ‘the church triumphant in the glory of the Lord’ thanks to this final testimony from his own lips.11 By the same testimony they can also know that this priest has been killed unjustly, like so many other unjust deaths among the people. Romero encouraged the people to read Navarro’s character and virtue off of his slain body, even as these are also revealed in his final act. Romero spoke strikingly of the details of dead bodies, using colorful words that emphasized the damage done. So, in addition to Navarro’s destroyed lips and disfigured mouth, he spoke of Fr. Octavio Ortiz’s ‘crushed face’ – using a uniquely Salvadoran word (apachado) with associations making reference to an absolute smashing and flattening. He outlined details from the funeral arrangements to emphasize his point, speaking of the ways Octavio walked a path that those listening are also called to walk. [Octavio] leaves us an example with a stole of blood, with a chasuble of pain, with his disfigured face. Poor Octavio died with his face smashed. What landed on top of him? We don’t know, but the coroner said: “He died of a crushing.” In order to prepare him, in the auxiliary funeral home they could not leave him as he was. Octavio has been transformed . . . because he gave up his face for Christ.This is what the Lord asks of us.12 Once again, Romero offered the dead priest as an example of the path his congregants were called to follow. While Romero offered a vivid depiction of the final state of Octavio’s body, he 156

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also left much to the imagination, but that is because ‘we don’t know.’ As with so many of the deaths, information is difficult to come by, due to the efforts of those responsible and the state authorities to cover up the details. But for Romero it was clear that a crushed face communicates something about the agency of Fr. Octavio in that moment of violence. A confrontation in which someone is crushed implies the person was at a severe disadvantage. As it happens, one eyewitness would later recount that Octavio had been run over by a tank.13 Fr. Octavio’s body – his very recognizability as the person that he was – is undone by the violence he suffered. An undertaker had to make him recognizable again. But Romero turned this detail on its head too: the perpetrators may be guilty of smashing Octavio, but in reality, Fr. Octavio willingly gave up his face – representing his very self – to God. And Octavio has been transformed not by the skill of an undertaker, but by that same God to whom he surrendered his body. Here again, Romero called upon the details of the body, especially those wounds and scars rendered by violence, as witness to the transparent character of the person who has suffered, while also testifying to the brutality of those inflicting the wounds. Romero called the church to imitate Fr. Octavio in this surrender and, implicitly, to be willing to suffer the same violence. In Romero’s sermons, the damage done to the body was emphasized, highlighted, and almost celebrated. Romero used vivid language to depict the moment of death and the destruction of the body for those who have not witnessed the scene of death themselves.The grotesque exhibits the virtue of the dead, even as it displays the evil committed. For Romero, the bloodier the death, the greater the virtue – particularly if death is accompanied by testimonies of the victim’s willingness to die and forgiveness of his enemies. This memorializing of the blood spilled and body destroyed continues in El Salvador today. The bronze sculpture in the cathedral basement may include a reminder of the murderous bullet, but it ultimately provides a restful depiction of Romero – as is appropriate, given its representation of the eternal rest of the saints. This relatively bloodless presence of Romero in the cathedral stands in contrast to the images and objects displayed when one visits Romero’s former home. One of a few sites of pilgrimage in honor of Romero (see the following section), Romero’s small home next to the chapel where he was killed displays the bloodied body of the beloved priest via a few key items: 1) a relic (i.e. body part) underneath the floor of the bedroom, revealed to visitors through a clear window; 2) the clothing Romero wore the day of his assassination; and 3) photographs of Romero’s death. The relic is a recent feature of the home, now that Romero has been officially beatified and his cause for sainthood appears to be on track. In this case the presence of the relic obviously serves as a reminder of Romero’s virtue, but it also brings to mind the long and contentious fight it has been to bring Romero’s cause to fruition. Romero’s clothing hangs in glass cases, the dull brown blood stains visible on his robe and on the gray button-down shirt he wore underneath the robe. Like the Jesuits’ clothing in the UCA museum, these items bring the death near: they collapse the history and space between the visitor and that fateful moment in the chapel. This distance is further collapsed by the vivid photos of Romero. In one, Romero lies near the altar with blood pouring out of his mouth and nose. In another, he is cleaned up and hours dead in the hospital, a nun gently kissing his forehead. The chaotic events between those two moments are not all captured in pictures, but one can imagine the desperation and panic of those involved. One views these photos knowing that the scene of death took place just across the street, increasing the images’ impact. Photographs play an important, though perhaps more subtle, role in the memorializing of the Jesuits. Set off from the main lobby area of the Centro Monseñor Romero, one finds a room resembling an elementary school classroom. This unassuming space holds the record of terrible things. Large photo albums stored in the room contain the pictures of the scenes of the Jesuits’ murders. Dozens of photographs document the destruction done to the bodies of those eight 157

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victims, as well as where they were found and the position of their bodies. My first time visiting the UCA, a Romero scholar who had been there several times gave me this advice: ‘You should enter to view the photos . . . once. Once is enough.’14 Many would come to the Centro and not even know the photos are there. They are not on display in the main museum. But the visitors who do view the photos enter the spaces of the Centro differently. Now, as they walk through the garden where four of the priests were found, they can picture the men’s bodies sprawled, riddled with bullets. When they see a stained piece of clothing hanging in the museum, that clothing takes on substance as it is remembered with the body it covered. Here again, as with Romero’s home, the remembrance of bodies via photos and blood-stained artifacts joins with place to collapse the distance between the remember-er and the remembered. In this way, the afterlives of the dead include speaking through the very death they died. Their spilled blood and destroyed bodies testify to their innocence: the bullet exploding in Romero’s chest as he lay next to the altar; the priests pulled out of bed and executed in their nightclothes; the body of Elba, barely recognizable, covering her daughter Celina, as she tried in vain to protect her.15 The victims’ bodies lie in positions that communicate vulnerability, witnessing to the injustice done and silently accusing their assassins.

3  Places: ‘Between the sacristy and the altar’ Deprived of the living presence of a person, we often turn to the places where they lived and died to remember them. These places, along with artifacts and possessions, become the tangible reminders of an individual’s presence. In other words, these physical spaces fill the vacuum left by the absent body. In El Salvador such locations take on multi-layered meanings beyond privatized mourning. As with the display of corpses, these locations are interpreted as both revealing the true character of the dead and accusing the guilty. They may also inspire imitation of the one remembered, which becomes a further threat to those who sought to silence the dead. We begin with the places associated with the martyred priests in life: places of birth and of ministry being the two most important. One Salvadoran priest closely associated with his place of birth and ministry is Fr. Rutilio Grande, S.J., the first priest killed during Romero’s time as archbishop. Fr. Rutilio was born in El Paisnal, a small, poor town one hour north of San Salvador. After traveling overseas for his studies as a young adult, he returned to El Salvador and, eventually, to El Paisnal. He was killed while on his way to celebrate Eucharist in El Paisnal, as the vehicle in which he was traveling was ambushed.16 His death is understood by most as being a primary catalyst for Romero’s subsequent stand against state-endorsed violence. Romero considered Fr. Rutilio to be a friend and – while they may have had slightly different emphases in their preaching and pastoral work – he trusted Rutilio’s character and teaching. Romero knew he was certainly not the violence-promoting Marxist portrayed in the news. In the funeral sermon for Fr. Rutilio, Romero focused little on the man himself and more on the confusion of messages he saw, a confusion he believed contributed to Rutilio’s death: the difference between true Christian liberation and merely human liberations. He used the opportunity to affirm that Rutilio preached the former.17 On the one year anniversary of Rutilio’s death (March, 1978), Romero’s sermon took a very different tone. It was a eulogy of the man himself. Romero addressed three points in his sermon: Rutilio as ‘man, Christian, [and] priest.’18 Standing in El Paisnal, Romero wove the place and its people into the fabric of his narrative, speaking first to Rutilio’s humanity, and beginning with his childhood: [Rutilio] is that man that carried from here a love for his people; that man that lived in this landscape that we are living right now; that man that, as the children of El Paisnal 158

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today, felt the dustiness of these streets, the sadness of that poverty, the difficulties of living in a little isolated town. And yet, here [are] the moral riches of our people, the riches of that man [and] where he learned to pray, where he learned to see God and to love his neighbor.19 Romero used the place where the congregants gathered to bring the presence of Rutilio near. The landscape was the same; the dusty streets had not changed. Romero then drew an explicit line from the landscape and its people to the character of Rutilio. It was in this very place that Rutilio became the faithful man he was and learned to show love to his fellow human beings. Romero referenced Rutilio’s poor upbringing, implying that little had changed in the town. He went on to recount how Rutilio, after ‘passing through universities and books and studies,’ did not think himself too grand or important to return to this little town: ‘That man who understood that true greatness . . . is not in having left here in order to gain riches in another town, but in returning to his people, loving his own.’20 For Romero, Rutilio’s return to his home town demonstrated his humility and the fact that he was not seeking wealth or power. Romero went on to recount Rutilio’s baptism in that same church, marking him as a Christian, and concluded by speaking to his role as priest. Fr. Rutilio was the priest for both El Paisnal and for a church in the larger town nearby, Aguilares. Romero recalled Rutilio’s body being laid out in the church in Aguilares the day he died, connecting his being anointed as priest with his being ‘anointed’ a martyr. Just as Rutilio had been anointed with holy oil the day he was made priest, so now he has been anointed with ‘the oil of martyrdom, with his own blood.’21 For Romero, seeing Rutilio lying prostrate on the floor of the church the day of his death echoed the day he was anointed priest, when also laid prostrate. Place and body come together here. In death, Rutilio is stretched out in the church where he served, tying him to place and community. His prone body echoed his posture of surrender at the moment of anointing to the priestly ministry. Just as he surrendered himself to God on that day, so he also faced death willingly, thus earning the title ‘martyr.’ We move next to the importance of the martyrs’ places of death. The locations of the martyrs’ deaths gain significance due to their association with the bodies, but it is also the case that these locations lend their own meanings to the deaths. As Romero needed to confront the accusations made against his slain priests, he used the very locations chosen by the killers to rehearse the life and character of the victims. Most of the priests murdered during Romero’s tenure were of his own diocese, the diocese of San Salvador. One murdered in August 1979, Fr. Alirio Napoleón Macías, served a different diocese – the parish of San Esteban Catarina in the diocese of San Vicente. Fr. Macías was alone in his church on August 4 when assassins disguised as locals presented some reason for wanting to speak to him. In his diary, Romero described the death of Fr. Macías as taking place ‘between the door of the sacristy and the main altar.’22 A recent book on the martyrs of the Salvadoran church repeats this detail – ‘between the altar and the sacristy’23 – and then offers the testimony of a religious sister who knew him: ‘[T]hey killed him like a prophet of Christ next to the altar.’24 Fr. Alirio’s place of death signals for many a particular significance to his death: he dies as a prophet. But it did not hold that significance for everyone, and certainly not for the bishop who disapproved of his pastoral work, Mons. Aparicio. In the case of Fr. Octavio, the battle over defining the place – a retreat center called El Despertar – became intimately tied to the battle over Fr. Octavio’s reputation and the meaning of his death. On January 20, 1979, the National Guard entered the premises of El Despertar, awakening many of the youth gathered there, and killed four young people alongside Fr. Octavio. Two of the boys were just 16 years old. In the funeral sermon for Octavio, Romero disputed the details 159

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that had been offered by the authorities and in the newspapers, using testimony from eyewitnesses. Romero directly quotes one of the eyewitness in the following lines: That this place is intended exclusively for Christian formation and that other types of meetings for conspiring against the State have not been facilitated, . . . That in this seminar . . . we used Catholic song books, musical instruments we found there, such as guitars, not existing in the power of any of the participants, in said Christian conference, arms of any kind.25 The eyewitness refutes one-by-one the claims put forth by the authorities: that the retreat center is a training ground for leftist militants; that the gathering that weekend was one such training; that the National Guard found the participants with firearms and so an armed confrontation ensued. Romero reiterates these points, inviting ‘anyone who does not know this house’ to come see it, trusting such firsthand knowledge will prove to them that it is not a guerrilla training center. Rather, it is a home ‘to promote groups of Christians with the criteria of the Gospel, criteria that are naturally very dangerous in our time.’26 Here Romero took a clear jab at the authorities, while also making a subtler point. It seems ridiculous to think that a Christian government would target a gathering of youth with musical instruments and songbooks. Yet Romero is suggesting that the perpetrators knew very well what kind of building this was and therefore what kind of gathering was taking place. They were not mistaken, thinking the group was armed, when it, in fact, was not. Rather, this group was targeted precisely for embodying and promoting the values of the Gospel, just as the church has been persecuted for the same reason in the previous two years.The death of these youth, in other words, simply proves that they were living out the Gospel, which had become so dangerous in the El Salvador of Romero’s time. The clearest – and most famous – example of the importance of the place of death as evidence of the virtue of the victim is Romero, himself. The most recent biography of Romero is written by an Italian historian closely involved with Romero’s cause for sainthood, Roberto Morozzo della Rocca. In his book Óscar Romero: Prophet of Hope, Morozzo della Rocca insists on a view of Romero as spiritual, traditional, and devoted to the church – though trying not to downplay his courageous stand against the state-sponsored violence. Nevertheless, Morozzo della Rocca uses the phrase ‘purely religious’ to describe Romero’s interpretation of his own possible death in his last few months, when he knew his life was under threat (Morozzo della Rocca, 2015: Loc. 3292). Near the end of the book Morozzo della Rocca makes the following argument: Romero’s beatification by the Catholic Church recognizes his martyrdom in odium fidei. Those who were his enemies during his lifetime thought that Romero had been killed out of hatred for his political positions. But it is difficult to argue that Romero, a bishop killed at the altar, during a Eucharistic liturgy, was not struck down in odium fidei, out of hatred for the faith. Morozzo della Rocca, 2015: Loc. 3091 Morozzo della Rocca distinguishes between what Romero’s enemies thought they were doing – killing Romero for political reasons – and what the facts of the situation display. While he has made a case throughout the book that Romero was not merely a ‘political’ bishop but a devotedly religious one, he ends the book by using the place of Romero’s death to put the final point on his argument. Romero is killed at the altar. How can his death not have religious significance? How can it not be in odium fidei? The recognition of Romero as a martyr has been bolstered by 160

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the place of his death, and as his path toward sainthood moves forward, the places associated with Romero in life become increasingly important, as discussed in the following section.

4  Communities: ‘Hand-in-hand with two campesinos’ Romero believed a priest belonged to the people, in both life and death.While other bodies may be mourned by friends and family, a priest is mourned by the church as a whole, but first and foremost the people he served. Romero frequently used the testimony of the priest’s parishioners and a recounting of the priest’s life of service to refute the slander against a dead priest. In the funeral sermon for Fr. Rafael Palacios, Romero mentioned the sadness of Fr. Rafael’s parishioners and quoted one: ‘If he sowed love, why did they kill him?’27 Later he used this question as the theme of his thirty-day memorial sermon for Fr. Rafael. Placing the priests in the context of their communities, their deaths become the culminating point in a life of sacrifice, sacrifice not for some abstract ideal but for concrete people. Romero used the circumstances of the priests’ death to further cement their solidarity with the community. Romero invoked the significance of Grande’s ties to the place and people of El Paisnal, as Grande died alongside two of his people: 70-year-old Manuel Solorzano and 16-yearold Nelson Rutilio Lemus. As Romero defended Rutilio’s preaching of the true Gospel in his funeral sermon, he commented on this circumstance: True love is that which brought Rutilio Grande to his death, hand-in-hand with two campesinos. That is how the Church loves. She dies with them. . . . A priest with his campesinos, walked toward his people, in order to identify himself with them, to live out with them not a revolutionary inspiration, but rather an inspiration of love.28 Romero was careful to point out the motivation for Rutilio’s solidarity with his people: love, not revolution. Rutilio died alongside the people he serves, representing the church who is willing to die alongside the people. Romero knew – particularly as his time as archbishop went on – that priests’ deaths were only the most visible of those being killed in the name of peace. When a Spanish journalist began an interview question to Romero by saying ‘Three years ago we reported in [our newspaper] on the growing conflict between the government and the Salvadoran church,’ Romero interrupted to correct her: It must be made very clear that the conflict is between the government and the people. There is conflict with the Church because we place ourselves on the side of the people. I insist on the fact that the Church is not interested in fighting with the government. . . [However], obviously, those who trample this people must be in a battle with this Church.29 The true victims are the Salvadoran people, and the priests simply die alongside them. The church gathers around its dead, and these priests belong not only to the local community but also to the church universal. Romero comments on the Catholic community that surrounds the dead bodies of Fr. Octavio Ortiz and the four young men killed alongside him: That multitude that fills the cathedral and the park is a multitude that is not circumscribed to this locale; through the radio it extends to almost the entire republic and, beyond the diocese and the nation, there is a feeling of being united in faith and hope with all of the people of God on pilgrimage in all the countries of the world.30 161

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In this case Romero drew a connection not just between the priest and his parishioners but between the murdered priest and the church universal. The Salvadoran government and even some of Romero’s fellow bishops wanted to draw a dividing line between the ‘true’ church and the priests who were being targeted, claiming they were persecuted not because of Gospel ministry but because they were Marxists. Romero undermined these efforts, aided by expressions of solidarity from around the world, by tying the priests to the church universal. In this case the presence of the head of the World Council of Churches at the funeral of Fr. Octavio, bringing a message of solidarity at the beginning of the service, aided Romero’s efforts. It was the opposing Salvadoran bishops who were in the minority, not the priests being persecuted. Romero made clear the public body of a priest in the funerals for both Fr. Grande and Fr. Palacios, striking a slightly different tone in each. At the funeral for his good friend Rutilio, Romero states that if it were a ‘simple funeral’ he would speak of the more personal aspects of Rutilio’s life. Instead, Romero recognizes the current moment as one necessitating a universal message.31 Romero turns his private mourning of a friend into a public event with societywide implications. He invites all who hear his sermon to identify themselves as the recipients of the message Grande’s corpse has to offer. Two years later, when Romero faces another priest’s death, his emphasis changes. With Fr. Grande, Romero emphasized what everyone could learn from the dead priest, and in the same sermon made a call to the authorities to fully investigate the crime and bring the perpetrators to justice. At the time, it seems he still had some hope for good intentions on the part of the government. When Palacios died in June 1979, by contrast, Romero’s denunciation of the state-sponsored violence and his perception of persecution of the church drew him to offer very different conclusions: And it is natural – as any family has the right – that the Church family, following a Christian tradition, invites, gathers together to celebrate the thirtieth day, in order to pray for the dead, first of all. We are doing nothing wrong such that they should monitor us in such a cumbersome way. Upon arriving at the cathedral, the police and national guard picket lines at the three entrances surprised me. It is nothing bad what we came here to do: to pray for our dead. Any family has the right to pray for their dead, and our Church is a family. 32 The public body of a priest became evident in the threat that the gathered mourners posed to the authorities. In a foreshadowing of Romero’s own funeral, the cathedral was closely monitored and heavily guarded during the service, for fear that remembering this dead priest would provoke a popular response against the government. To counter such measures, Romero argued that the church was simply a family mourning her dead as any other family would: with prayer. He utilized spiritual rhetoric to counter the government’s attempts to portray the priests and bishops as dangerous revolutionaries. As in the case with the murder of the young people in El Despertar, Romero implied that the government seemed to be threatened by simple spiritual acts such as prayer and mourning the dead. By portraying the authorities in this way, Romero reinforced the narrative that the church was being unjustly persecuted and underscored the virtuous character of the martyrs. Just as Rutilio and Rafael were killed for simply carrying out their pastoral work, so too the community was now threatened for grieving as servants in a faithful Christian way. The year 2017 marked the 100th anniversary of Romero’s birth, as well as the 40th anniversary of Rutilio Grande’s death. The Salvadoran church marked the occasion with a pilgrimage on the weekend before his birthday (August 15), walking with various stops from the cathedral in San Salvador to the place of Romero’s birth, Ciudad Barrios. In addition to the Cathedral 162

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itself – where Romero celebrated mass most Sundays and where he is buried – and his birthplace, Romero’s home and the chapel where he was killed (located across the street from his home) have become important sites of remembrance and pilgrimage as well. While these sites are politically non-threatening now, it has not always been so. On September 9, 1979, Romero traveled to Aguilares to celebrate the funeral mass of a local catechist who had been murdered. He described in his diary the situation after the funeral: After the mass, we went to visit the tomb of Father Grande, in El Paisnal, where there was also the television crew, to capture for the Archdiocese some views of that place that is so venerated. In the atmosphere there was a lot of fear. The people, from far away, watched, they did not come close. An ‘oreja,’33 as we call it, walked very close, spying to see what we were doing, and the National Guard was visible about half a block away, where it has its headquarters, also very uneasy. All in all, an abnormal situation, a psychosis that has been created in all of these places that are so tormented by the repression.34 The community gathered for the funeral of a beloved catechist, but then was too fearful to come near Fr. Grande’s tomb, particularly with the National Guard nearby. Here we have the joining of body, place, and community: the presence of the dead body of the priest renders a particular place simultaneously revered and dangerous. It is revered by the community, and for that very reason is considered threatening by the powers-that-be.The community gathered around a dead body or in a place associated with a martyr is a particularly threatening event for those who have tried to silence the martyrs through violence. I suggest that it is the imitation of the martyrs that the authorities feared – an imitation that Romero actively encouraged through his reading of the ‘messages’ the cadavers had to offer.

5 Conclusion After decades of relative silence on their martyrs, Salvadoran church officials have recently been reclaiming that history more publicly. Jon Sobrino, well-known liberation theologian – and a fellow Jesuit who would have been killed in the November 1989 massacre if he had not been overseas – critiqued the Salvadoran church hierarchy in a journal article from 1995. He pointed out that the church authorities had hardly mentioned the martyrs in the fifteen years prior, stating that the average person notices this and interprets the silence as advocating for silent forgetfulness. ‘[T]o remember the martyrs – they seem to say – would now bring more harm than good: social trauma and intolerance, things that should disappear in the new El Salvador.’35 The current archbishop, José Luis Escobar Alas, quotes Sobrino in his most recent pastoral letter and admits that the church has failed to recognize and uphold the martyrs of El Salvador – aside from efforts made to move Romero’s canonization forward (Escobar Alas, 2017: n. 1–4). These comments come at the beginning of Mons. Escobar’s most recent pastoral letter, focused entirely on the theme of martyrdom. With the title ‘You too will give witness because you have been with me since the beginning,’ the letter recounts the martyrs of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s in El Salvador, also offering reflections on the theme of martyrdom in the Bible and teachings of the church. In the letter on martyrdom, Mons. Escobar echoes the dual themes we have seen in the preaching of Romero: affirming the virtue and eternal hope of the martyrs, while denouncing the injustice that has brought about their deaths. After recounting the stories of the Salvadoran martyrs, Escobar concludes the first section of the letter: ‘Finally, I repeat: Martyrdom is not a 163

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failure. It is victory, it is a gift and the greatest comfort that God gifted us in the almost three decades of persecution against the Church in El Salvador’ (Escobar Alas, 2017: n. 148). These martyrs are not simply victims, but victors. At the same time, this perspective does not excuse the perpetrators of violence, and Escobar issues a call for justice: The Salvadoran legal system should not continue tolerating that the martyrs here mentioned, joined with the hundreds of assassinations committed against pastoral workers, catechists, and laypeople committed to the Kingdom, continue with impunity. . . . May God allow [the authorities] to hear this voice that asks them from the bottom of the heart: Clarify the truth, not leaving these witnesses to the truth without judgments in accord with the truth! Not out of revenge, but rather as an act of justice, charity, and love for the truth; above all, love for the Truth. Escobar Alas, 2017: 157, p. 99 Why speak out now? Clearly the beatification of Romero in May 2015 has something to do with it. However, another clue comes from the theme of Mons. Escobar’s first pastoral letter, published just one year earlier: ‘I see in the city violence and strife’ (Escobar Alas, 2016). Mons. Escobar takes up the theme of violence, speaking both to the country’s current situation and also to its history. His opening words are somber: I would have liked to have addressed these words to you at a better time; but I do it in the middle of a situation full of pain, violence, discord and death, as you all well know. This situation has been playing out for decades, and is not declining but rather continually increasing; filling our society with fear, taking away our joy and unfortunately, often hardening our hearts to the point of leaving us paralyzed or speechless. Escobar, 2016: n. 1 He points out that the number of homicides in recent years has reached a similar level to the number during a representative year of the war (Escobar, 2016: n. 8). This comparison of the current situation of violence to the civil war years is a common one, heard among my friends and contacts. Escobar attributes the violence of today in part to the ‘impunity’ given by the government for crimes committed during the war.36 But he also traces the history of violence in El Salvador even further back, to the time of the ‘conquest,’ and names the ‘pedagogy of death’ that has been at work in the society ever since. Finally, he looks to the systemic issues and structural injustices that lay at the root of much of the violence. The letter on violence is published on the feast day of Mons. Romero; the letter on martyrdom a year later on the anniversary of Rutilio Grande’s death. The archbishop presented the second letter in a celebration at the tomb of Fr. Rutilio, marking a stark contrast to that day recorded in Romero’s diary, when the people were fearful to gather around the tomb.Today the church is seeking again to offer the martyrs as exemplars, in a situation of violence and death. Escobar calls on his people to turn away from violence, echoing his predecessor Romero. He lays out the sacrifice of the martyrs, sacrifices they made for the peace and flourishing of El Salvador. The memory of Romero and Grande and the others remains strong in El Salvador. The weight of their sacrifice bears on the people, and there is a sense of wanting to assure that their sacrifice was not in vain. Shortly after Romero’s death, a Mexican journalist published what soon became Romero’s most well-known quote: ‘If they kill me, I will rise again in the Salvadoran people.’ Romero’s biographer Morozzo della Rocca makes a convincing case that this quote is most likely apocryphal – i.e. not the words Romero himself used (Morozzo 164

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della Rocca, 2015: Loc. 2112.). But perhaps whether or not Romero said those exact words is not the point. Rather, they reflect the memory of the community and the ongoing effect of Romero’s death. They reflect too the framework Romero himself offered for Salvadoran martyrdom.Those who sacrifice themselves live on in their people via the memorializing of bodies, significant places, and the communities of which they are a part. Just as Romero re-narrated the violence against bodies and communities so as to expose the injustices of Salvadoran society and also the faith and hope of the martyrs, so today’s Salvadoran church looks to the martyrs to shed light on both the roots of the current violence and also to offer a path of hope for the future. Key words: Óscar Romero, El Salvador, martyr, death, Catholicism

Notes 1 The traditional headdress of a Catholic bishop. 2 Just after midnight on Nov. 16, 1989, following the instructions of top members of the Salvadoran military, members of the U.S. trained Atlacatl Battalion entered the residence of the Jesuit priests on the UCA campus and brutally murdered the six priests present, along with their housekeeper and her 16-year-old daughter. Cf., Doggett (1993). 3 I discuss this further in section two on ‘Places.’ 4 For a good overview of the efforts at prosecution and the details that have been uncovered, see Eisenbrandt (2017). 5 Óscar Romero, ‘Un juicio de Dios,’ Homilías, Tomo III, Colección Teología latinoamericana, v. 32 (San Salvador, El Salvador: UCA Editores, 2005–2009), 443–444, emphasis added. Translations my own, unless otherwise noted. Throughout the rest of the chapter I will reference each homily by its title, the volume number (‘Tomo’), and page number. 6 Romero, ‘Un juicio de Dios,’ Tomo III, 441–442. 7 On May 11, 1977, Fr. Alfonso Navarros was killed by two men entering his home, along with a 14-yrold Luisito Torres. He received seven bullets in his body and died shortly after arriving at the hospital. See Testigos de la Fe en El Salvador: Nuestros sacerdotes y seminarista diocesanos mártires (1977–1993) (San Salvador, El Salvador: Cooperativa Sacerdotal COOPESA, 2015), 61–63. 8 Romero, ‘Un ideal que no muere,’ Tomo 1, 78. 9 Óscar Romero, ‘Penitencia y oración,’ Homilías, Tomo I, 91. 10 Luke 23:34. Romero frequently emphasizes these words from Jesus, not only in the context of funerals like Navarro’s, but also in speaking of the nonviolent response required of Christians to the violence being perpetrated. 11 Testigos de la Fe en El Salvador, 2015, 63. 12 Romero, ‘Un asesinato que nos habla de resurrección,’ Tomo IV, 192–193. 13 For an account of Fr. Octavio’s life and details of his death, see Testigos de la fe en El Salvador, 2015, 97–112. 14 Edgardo Colón Emeric, in discussion with the author, April 2015. 15 Elba and Celina Ramos are the housekeeper and her daughter killed alongside the Jesuits, presumable so no witnesses would remain. 16 For a biography of Grande, see Cardenal (2017). 17 Romero, ‘Una motivación de amor,’ Tomo I, 31–36. 18 Romero, ‘Rutilio Grande como hombre, cristiano, y sacerdote,’ Tomo II, 319–326. 19 Ibid., 320. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 324. 22 Romero (2000: p. 237). 23 Testigos de la fe en El Salvador, 2015, 150. 24 Ibid., 159. 25 Romero, ‘Un asesinato que nos habla de resurrección,’ Tomo IV, 187–188. 26 Ibid., 187.

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Mandy Rodgers-Gates 2 7 Romero, ‘La voz de la sangre,’ Tomo V, 31. 28 Romero, ‘Una motivación de amor,’ Tomo I, 34–35. 29 ‘Solo cumplo con mi deber, entrevista a Monseñor Romero de María López Vigil,’ Vida Nueva, N. 1182, 2 de junio de 1979 (Spain); Reproduced in Si me matan, resucitaré en el pueblo salvadoreño (Lima, Peru: CELADEC [Comisión Evangélica Latino Americana de Educación Cristiana], 1980), 169–173. 30 Romero, ‘Un asesinato que nos habla de resurrección,’ 183–184. 31 Romero, ‘Una motivación de amor,’ Tomo I, 31. 32 Romero, ‘¿Por qué mataron a Rafael Palacios?’ Tomo V, 126. 33 Slang term for a police informer. 34 Romero, Su diario, 2000, 254–255. 35 Sobrino, ‘Los mártires y la teología de la liberación,’ Revista Latinoamericana de Teología, RELaT 162. As quoted in Escobar Alas (2017: n. 145). 36 An amnesty law was passed in El Salvador shortly after the signing of the peace accords. This law was overturned by the Supreme Court in July 2016, four months after the publication of the pastoral letter being discussed here.

Further reading Ching, E. (2016) Stories of Civil War in El Salvador: A Battle over Memory. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. A literary and historical approach that finds different ‘memory communities’ have emerged in postconflict El Salvador, analyzed via life stories. Moodie, E. (2010) El Salvador in the Aftermath of Peace: Crime, Uncertainty, and the Transition to Democracy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. An ethnographic study of postwar violence and crime, as told through the eyes of ordinary Salvadorans in everyday life. Peterson, A. L. (1997) Martyrdom and the Politics of Religion: Progressive Catholicism in El Salvador’s Civil War. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. A brief examination of the role martyrdom played in the rhetoric and politics of progressive Catholic groups in the 1970s and 1980s in El Salvador. Sobrino, J. (2003) Witnesses to the Kingdom: The Martyrs of El Salvador and the Crucified Peoples. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. The fellow Jesuit of the six murdered in 1989 offers theological reflections on the significance of martyrdom, birthed out of the Salvadoran context but applicable to the broader Christian tradition.

Bibliography Bartlett, R. (2013) Why Can the Dead do such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cardenal, R. (2017) Vida, pasión y muerte del jesuita Rutilio Grande. San Salvador, El Salvador: UCA editores. Doggett, M. (1993) Death Foretold:The Jesuit Murders in El Salvador. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. Eisenbrandt, M. (2017) Assassination of a Saint: The Plot to Murder Óscar Romero and the Quest to Bring His Killers to Justice. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Escobar Alas, J. L. (2016) Veo en la Ciudad Violencia y Discordia, Carta Pastoral. San Salvador: Arquidiócesis de San Salvador, 24 March. Escobar Alas, J. L. (2017) Ustedes También Darán Testimonio: Porque han estado conmigo desde el principio, II Carta Pastoral. San Salvador: Arquidiócesis de San Salvador, 12 March. Laqueur, T. (2015) The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Morozzo della Rocca, R. (2015) Óscar Romero: Prophet of Hope. Boston, MA: Daughters of St. Paul. Kindle Edition. Romero, Ó. (2000) Monseñor Oscar A. Romero, su diario: desde 31 marzo de 1978 hasta jueves 20 de marzo de 1980. San Salvador, El Salvador: Imprenta Criterio.

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Corpses that preach Romero, Ó. (2005–2009) Homilías. Tomos I-VI. Colección Teología latinoamericana, v. 32. San Salvador, El Salvador: UCA Editores. Si me matan, resucitaré en el pueblo salvadoreño (1980) Lima, Peru: CELADEC (Comisión Evangélica Latino Americana de Educación Cristiana). Testigos de la Fe en El Salvador: Nuestros sacerdotes y seminarista diocesanos mártires (1977–1993). (2015) San Salvador, El Salvador: Cooperativa Sacerdotal COOPESA.

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14 PHOTOGRAPHING HUMAN FINITUDE Philosophical reflections on photographs of death Mathew A. Crawford 1 Introduction Western philosophical reflections on the ontology of photography often center on the complex relation between the medium and human finitude. Photography promises that its subject will endure; yet, what endures is an image of what was. In his celebrated Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes claims that because each photographic portrait, as soon as it is fixed, is instantly of what has been, photographs portend not only the death of those imaged, but all of our deaths (Barthes, 2010: pp. 83–85). In a similar manner, André Bazin famously likens the photograph to embalmed time and one more way of attempting to preserve the body from death’s natural corruption (Bazin, 2004: pp. 9–14). Yet, photography does not only share an intimate connection with death, but also life. In her recent work, Kaja Silverman proposes an analogical relation between the photograph and its subject. The subject, analogically both present and absent, discloses itself through the photographic image (Silverman, 2015: pp. 7–12).1 Following Silverman, photographic portraits can be read as carrying our self-disclosure. Not only do photographs then promise to carry a sense of our presence beyond ourselves, but carry a sense of our lives beyond our lives – a sense of a photographic afterlife. There is far from a consensus on this complex relation between photography and human finitude. In this chapter, I address this relation through the work of Susan Sontag whose principal contribution comes through her inextricably linking questions of ontology with the ethical implications of photographing the suffering, dying, and the dead. She argues that photography can force us to be complicit voyeurs precisely by bringing the reality of suffering and death before us (a quasi-presence of the subject). Our necessary absence from this reality leaves us impotent to respond. Her account is complicated by a series of published photographs taken by her friend and lover Annie Leibovitz, which in part document Sontag’s death and include postmortem photographs as she was prepared for burial. Though postmortem photographs seem to simply present death, I argue below that even they can also convey a complex sense of life. Investigating the radical divergent ways we can take photographic images – take them as images of life or death or both – not only provides insights into the nature of photography, but our human nature. I begin this chapter with a reading of Leibowitz’s photographs, attending to the divergent ways one can approach these images. Next, I turn to Sontag’s own writings, addressing her 168

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ethical warnings regarding photographing the suffering, dying, and the dead. In response to Sontag I engage the writings of Stanley Cavell who argues that the confusion surrounding the nature of photography is due to our confused relation to reality. He holds a similar ontology of photography as Sontag, where reality’s presence is brought before us while we are absent from it; but for Cavell, it is not photography which distorts us into absented viewers. Instead, photography tangibly manifests and confirms the modern experience of distance from others and the world. This turn to the interrogation of the self and how we relate to the world and others resituates and broadens Sontag’s ethical claims. We cannot make claims about the nature of the photograph, and the reality it puts before us, without asking who we are who take and view the images. And any philosophical discussion about the photograph’s promise to carry our lives beyond our lives cannot be an abstract investigation of ontology but must account for us who keep images of those we love after their death.

2  Photographing the dead In 2006, Annie Leibovitz published A Photographer’s Life: 1990–2005, an autobiographical memoir comprised of a brief text and a lengthy representational collection of her photographic work. It is principally a work of imaged bodies – bodies of land, bodies of water, but primarily human bodies, young and old, dying and being born, strong and frail, clothed and naked, joyful and suffering, alive and dead. The book began, she recounts, as an attempt to compile a private and intimate memorial collection of images after the death of her longtime friend and lover Susan Sontag. It blossomed into a mingling of professional and private images that express significant moments in Leibovitz’s life. Iconic images of celebrities are layered between Leibovitz’s intimate, personal photographs. Some of the images are of war, some of foreign locales, while others capture seemingly mundane moments of her everyday life with Sontag, Leibovitz’s parents and siblings, and her children. A few sets of images draw out important questions about our relation to photographs and death. In one series of black-and-white photographs, Leibovitz documents Sontag’s illness, treatment, and recovery from cancer in 1998. Leibovitz collaborated with Sontag on these images. One four-page spread exhibits moments of Sontag’s suffering and evident irritation as she is bedridden receiving chemotherapy. The blankets and gown often fail to cover her as she shifts to find comfort. Sontag’s pain is exposed, but in some of these images and the ones which follow she looks in the direction of Leibovitz and her camera. The photographs speak of her self-yielding. They document her hair loss, and end with a confident portrait of Sontag staring boldly out through the image. She is wearing a black turtleneck almost covering he mouth. Her hair has returned, short and all white. It is an image of recovery and Leibovitz writes that these images ‘tell a complete story’ (Leibovitz, 2006). Leibovitz found Sontag’s final illness six years later too distressing to document, but, as she recounts, she forced herself to take photographs of Sontag at the very end of her life. These not only include images of her final days, but postmortem photographs. They begin with images of Sontag’s last treatment. Similar to the previous set of images, she is bedridden, but in these photographs there is no sense of acknowledgment of Leibovitz or her camera. Sontag appears to be deep in a painful sleep. One cannot help but also imagine Leibovitz’s feeling of helplessness even as she helped facilitate her care. These final images of Sontag’s life are followed by postmortem photographs of her death. Unique to the book as a whole, the first two-page spread is displayed as a photographer’s contact sheet, laying out twenty images of Sontag in a wooden room at the funeral home dressed for burial. Not only is Sontag almost unrecognizable, but in these apparently unedited images Leibovitz the photographer is unrecognizable.They begin with close-ups 169

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of her hands and move to images of her bust. Leibovitz then takes photographs in increments from Sontag’s head to toe. Photographing from Sontag’s side, Leibovitz makes a divided documentation of the length of her body. Some of the images are blurry, all are yellowed.2 On the following pages Leibovitz has printed the separate images of the length of her body and overlapped them into a whole. In this black-and-white photograph of physically layered photographs, she has created a single image while maintaining the fragmented nature of her images as each seam is torn and creased – it is whole and divided simultaneously. Reflecting on these images, Leibovitz expresses a sense of compulsion, a need to take these final photographs. She speaks of shooting the images in a trance and muses that perhaps they should be read as a final completion to the earlier collection of photographs of her illness. It is worth noting that they are followed by photographs of the death and burial of Leibovitz’s father, who died six weeks after Sontag. The book is a manifest expression of Leibovitz’s grief for both her friend and lover, as well as her father, interwoven with a sense of gratitude for the mundane and joyous moments of her life; she concludes, ‘It’s the closest thing to who I am that I’ve ever done’ (Leibovitz, 2006: n.p.). As readers of these photographs, we feel as if we are shown images we are not allowed to see. We are not sure who can authorize our viewing photographs of the dying and of the dead. On one hand, we can follow that Leibovitz is a photographer, that her life is lived in relation to photographs, and that this collection is an attempt to share this life with others.We can imagine, following her account of weeping daily as she collected and arranged the images, that they are expressions of her love for Sontag and her father, that they are an invitation to weep with her. On the other hand, we can empathize with David Rieff, Sontag’s son, who in his own painful memoir of caring for his mother at the end of her life speaks only of these images once in utter disgust, finding his mother unrecognizable and ‘humiliated posthumously by being “memorialized” that way in those carnival images of celebrity death’ (Rieff, 2008: p. 150). We are not sure what to make of these divergent responses. Postmortem photographs appear to be free from the complex claims regarding photography’s ability to convey life and death as they seem to simply be images of death.Yet, even these photographs resist this simple reading. In Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America, Jay Ruby describes the once common and open practice of taking and displaying postmortem photographs of loved ones in the mid-nineteenth century. He argues that the photographs, placed alongside images taken while the loved one was yet living, remind the families of the reality of death (Ruby, 1995: pp. 7, 174). Jennifer Malkowski diverges from Ruby by drawing attention to the elaborate methods used by professional photographers of this time to ‘create “sleeping” lifelike corpses’ (Malkowski, 2017: p. 31). She concludes in part that this common ‘last sleep’ pose demonstrates not only a recognition of death but a desire to convey the life of the subject. The images are not merely memento mori, but ‘engage in the purest form of the new medium’s preservational function: a promise to let the living retain some piece of the dead’ (ibid.). Since the publishing of Ruby’s account, which in part argues that postmortem photography became less public but never disappeared from American culture, there has been a kind of resurgence of professional postmortem photography led by the charity Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep. This organization connects professional portrait photographers who donate their services to ‘families facing the untimely death of an infant.’3 The postmortem photographs of the infants taken on location in the hospital regularly convey a sense of sleep.4 Cheryl Haggard co-founded Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep after a series of photographs were taken of her and her husband with her 6-day-old son at the end of his life. Her comments on these images attest to the way photographs taken in the face of death can convey life: ‘That night was the worst night of my life. But when I look at the images, I am not reminded of my worst night. I’m reminded of the beauty and 170

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blessings [my son] brought.’5 These images are published on the charity’s informational materials, and we can imagine others, bereaved parents for example, unable to look at them. Simultaneously, we can take Haggard’s response to the beauty of the life of her son both moving and appropriate. There is a moment in Leibovitz’s reflection on her photographs which invites us to read her as finding some sense of life in the postmortem photographs of Sontag: After she died, I chose the clothes she would be buried in and took them to [the] funeral home myself. The dress is one we found in Milan. It’s an homage to Fortuny, made the way he made them, with pleated material. Susan had a gold one and a greenblue one. She had been sick on and off for several years, in the hospital for months. It’s humiliating.You lose yourself. And she loved to dress up. Leibovitz, 2006 Leibovitz longed to give Sontag some sense of herself back in these final images. A self she finds was to some extent lost through the years of sickness. She dresses her in a way that is both materially connected to their life together, and also indicative of what she knew Sontag loved. Read in this light, we can take these postmortem photographs as Leibovitz attempting to affirm Sontag’s life. This does not change the fact that Reiff cannot recognize his mother in these images, but it does speak to the ways in which they do not merely convey death. Postmortem photographs, which might appear on the surface to the contemporary reader incapable of conveying life, are open to these radically divergent views. To one they can convey the beauty of the life of a loved one. To another they can wound, only conveying loss and the absence of life. I take this as indicative of our inability to secure not only the meaning of photographs, but our inability to secure our relation to reality – to others and the world. To make this argument I must first turn to Sontag directly and then engage her through the work of Stanley Cavell.

3  The reality of photographs of war Sontag begins On Photography by noting the ubiquity of personal photography. We have en masse placed cameras between us and the world, and we capture and collect the world in snapshots.We can take these pieces of the world with us, and she charges, we are thereby tricked into taking the world as ours for the purpose of collecting. The world seems more available to us than it really is (Sontag, 2001). In this narration, photographing the world changes our relation to it. Sontag continues this claim regarding photographing the suffering, dying, and the dead. Written in the wake of the Vietnam conflict, Sontag centers her arguments on the photography of war. The war photojournalist, essential to public life in the United States during this time, brings the images of distant wars to American homes. Photojournalists mediate images of suffering and death from a distance – both the photographer’s distance from the subject and the viewer’s from the horrors of foreign war. Necessarily failing to aid the suffering and dying by this separation, Sontag’s imagined war photographer ‘has the choice between a photograph and life,’ and ‘choose[s] the photograph’ (Sontag, 2001: p. 12). In On Photography, the photojournalist of war is paradigmatic of the photographer in general. Each time we photograph we are necessarily distanced from the subject being captured. In the case of the dying, Sontag asserts, we are morally culpable for looking, for the act of looking denies them our aid. Without tangibly helping them we have no right to look. Failing to aid those suffering and dying is not the extent of Sontag’s charges: ‘[P]hotographing is more than passive observing. Like sexual voyeurism, it is a way of at least tacitly, often 171

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explicitly, encouraging whatever is going on to keep on happening . . . including . . . another person’s pain’ (ibid.). For Sontag, the choice to photograph is a choice to perpetuate suffering and foster death. As Sontag amps up her rhetoric, she declares that the photographer ‘violates’ the one photographed. Photographers never simply re-present what happened; they are never ethically neutral observers. Sontag’s account is broader than this diatribe against an abstract photojournalist of war. She interrogates the entire process of taking, reproducing, and viewing images of suffering and death, finding the entire complex of actions unacceptable. Sontag does not allow us (Americans) to be appeased that we are moved by the images. Nor that we express moral outrage over a photographer’s failure to aid the suffering. Neither can we find satisfaction that we contribute to social pressure exerted to enact distant change. Sontag’s critique forces us to ask what it does to us to look at these images. What it means for these images to haunt us, or even more troubling, to fail to haunt us. Why we find ourselves consuming these images without knowing why or what this means. The autobiographical moments of Sontag’s essays are both revealing and compelling. In On Photography, Sontag appeals to her own exposure to images of the Holocaust to argue that not only are we complicit voyeurs when viewing images of distant suffering and death, but familiarity with images of horror deadens our capacity to feel and in turn to act (Sontag, 2001: p. 19). Her first experience with the ‘photographic inventory of ultimate horror’ came in discovering images of Dachau and Bergen-Belsen as an adolescent. ‘Nothing I have seen,’ she writes, ‘ – in photographs or in real life – ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Indeed, it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts, before I saw those photographs (I was twelve) and after. . . . When I looked at those photographs, something broke’ (Sontag, 2001: p. 20). The wound of these images did not heal. She reflects on her experience: ‘[S]omething went dead; something is still crying’ (ibid.). It is helpful to highlight two related problems Sontag names in this context of being wounded by images of suffering. The first is her repeated concern that we can find ourselves appeased, personally consoled, simply by the fact that we feel emotionally moved by the image. Not only are we not acting to alleviate anyone’s suffering or prevent death, but the consolation itself can satiate us and take our motivation. Second, we can find ourselves numb in the face of the constant wounding from images of suffering and death which we are absent from. Sontag’s claims are tied to her briefly addressed but important description of photography’s ontological relation to its subject. She writes that the photograph brings ‘both a pseudopresence and a token of absence’ (Sontag, 2001: p. 16). We experience something akin to the presence of the subject of the image – she declares that the image is not a possibility but a reality – while simultaneously recognizing our absence from what we are viewing. In the case of photographs of suffering and death we see the reality of the horrors before us, but given our necessary absence from what we see all we can do to respond is look. This simultaneous quasipresence and absence, Sontag argues, forces us to be complicit voyeurs. Her autobiographical confession implies that those of us properly attuned will experience an emotional rupture under the weight of this thought. Over time the ubiquity of experiencing the quasi-presence of actual humans suffering will deaden our ability to respond. Sontag’s argument in this early essay leads to a further claim in On Photography. She worries that the manner in which we approach photographs, collecting and preserving them, is not driven by a desire to attend to the pain of others, but to avoid it. It seems that we do not want to feel more, but less. Sontag’s worry that photographs of the suffering and the dead erode the meaning of suffering and death is rooted in her understanding of how photographs relate to the meaning of the world. In discussing how photographs can lie, a claim that is important for Cavell that is addressed 172

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below, Sontag briefly describes developments in the history of the creation and perception of photography. The automation of the camera was initially viewed as a perfect representation of the world. It did not take long, she continues, to realize that the photographer is evaluating the world with the images, and a complex view of photography came to shape our current perspective. ‘[P]hotographs don’t seem deeply beholden to the intentions of an artist. Rather, they own their existence to a loose cooperation (quasi-magical, quasi-accidental) between photographer and subject – mediated by an even simpler and more automated machine’ (Sontag, 2001: p. 53). Coupled with a further argument that photographs in different contexts, with different captions or in different media, have different meanings, she determines that this kind of proliferation erodes meaning. Sontag writes, As Wittgenstein argued for words, that the meaning is the use – so for each photograph. And it is in this way that the presence and proliferation of all photographs contributes to the erosion of the very notion of meaning, to that parceling out of the truth into relative truths which is taken for granted by the modern liberal consciousness. Sontag, 2001: p. 106 In this tantalizing but limited appeal to Wittgensteinian language philosophy, Sontag’s goal is to undermine the notion that photographic images can be counted on to truthfully represent the real to the viewer and in the process secure meaning – particularly ethical claims toward those suffering, dying, and the dead. In this sense her argument is successful, though truncated. We appeal to captions, she notes, to limit the possible meaning of the images, but this cannot ‘prevent any argument or moral plea which a photograph (or set of photographs) is intended to support from being undermined by the plurality of meanings that every photograph carries’ (Sontag, 2001: p. 109). Sontag is not only rejecting the notion that the camera can be counted on to tell the truth, but claiming that the ubiquity of photographs erodes their meaning altogether. Their only meaning is the possibility of innumerable meanings.6 In addition, her specific corrective to a romanticized notion of photography implies that we can find a better way to secure meaning somewhere other than through photographs. Our hopes wrongly placed in the image should be directed elsewhere. Her reader is left to discern where this is, but she insists that it is not found from the consuming side of the camera’s shutter or the re-presented image. Before proceeding toward a fuller understanding of Sontag’s claims it is important to recognize two coexisting realities evident in this early account. First, the distorted nature of her rhetoric, with its focus on photography of war as paradigmatic, neglects a serious account of the goods of photography. Second, though her claims are imbalanced, to a certain sense they are compelling and seem to open a perspective on photography heretofore overlooked. Sontag thus points somewhat wildly at neglected aspects and problems evident in the use of a medium which rightly deserves careful attention and exploration.

4  The distance suffering makes The concern of securing ethical demands through images and thus relating to the suffering, dying, and the dead are central to one of Sontag’s final works, Regarding the Pain of Others. Published decades after On Photography, Regarding the Pain of Others revisits and nuances her previous claims. She frames her discussion with an engagement with Virginia Woolf ’s Three Guineas – a gendered critique of war which in part discusses the ways that war photography elicits the same and different responses in the viewers. Woolf ’s non-fictional response to a ‘gentleman’ asking 173

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her ‘How in your opinion are we to prevent war?’ is presented as a test of the ‘difficulty of communication’ (Woolf, 1966: p. 4). Woolf attempts to see if her interlocutor and she ‘feel[s] the same things’ when looking at published images of the Spanish Civil War (Woolf, 1966: p. 10). Is shared dialogue possible given the fact that both Woolf and her interlocutor, an unnamed lawyer, are from the educated class but separated by the ‘gulf ’ of gender? They both, Woolf takes for granted, will be horrified by the images of war present in their daily newspaper. She describes an image depicting a bombed-out home littered with almost unrecognizable corpses of adults and children. In that they are both horrified, they are viewing the same image and in agreement.7 However, the differences of gendered social roles do not allow the two to respond to the images in the same manner. Woolf ’s decidedly limited options for preventing war compared to men of her class cannot sustain the ‘we’ of the question ‘How in your opinion are we to prevent war?’ Shared dialogue cannot hold. Regarding the Pain of Others turns on this question of the ‘we.’ Sontag applauds Woolf ’s recognition that gender roles can undermine truthful, shared dialogue. Yet, she chides Woolf for appealing to a ‘hypothetical shared experience’ where the ‘shock of such pictures cannot fail to unite people of good will’ (Sontag, 2003: p. 6).These images often fail to unite.The same images of human ‘collateral damage’ can inspire the viewer to take up arms as easily as it can inspire others to oppose war. Woolf has not gone far enough. She has only exposed one way images of war fail to unite while presuming that anyone who is not morally bankrupt will be pained by these pictures of death and seek to prevent war altogether. Regarding the Pain of Others is Sontag’s response to the concerns central to Woolf ’s project: the interrogation of who constitutes the ‘we’ when confronted with the death and dying of others. Instead of placing the great gulf that separates us when we attempt to regard the pain of others with gender, Sontag argues that the difference is fixed between those suffering and facing death (and perhaps those who work to alleviate suffering and prevent death) and the rest of us voyeurs. Sontag’s early arguments addressing war photography focus almost entirely on the ways photographs can corrupt and deceive the viewer into complacency and inaction. Those concerns are still central to Regarding the Pain of Others, but she shifts her position in two important ways. First, she questions her previous position that the ubiquity of photographs dulls viewers to the pain of others, instead focusing on the consumerist manner in which we approach the images. It is not simply the images that corrupt, but the manner in which we relate to the death of others as collectors and consumers of images. Once we take in the images and fit them into our predetermined ideological construct that affirms we are both impotent and blameless, we can dismiss what we have seen.8 Second, Sontag explores the way horrific images haunt us and, in the process, press us to reflect upon our relation to the suffering, dying, and dead. Our reflection, she allows cautiously, may teach us how to aid the ones we see in the images. Images might be capable of only haunting us; they will never tell us how to respond to the suffering and dying. But she concedes that there is still value in the haunting image. We are thereby reminded what human beings can do to one another, the violence we can inflict or the deaths we can cause by inaction. ‘Such images cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers’ (Sontag, 2003: p. 117). Invitations like this, invitation to think on these things, are rare in contemporary Western society. When they offer this space to reevaluate our actions they have value. For Sontag, we are still responsible for avoiding the ever-present danger of voyeurism. Sontag’s limited acknowledgement in her late work that images of suffering and death could potentially have positive social benefits is always joined with her continuous warning of

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voyeurism. Referencing a close-up photograph of a World War I veteran missing most of his face, Sontag writes, Perhaps only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it . . . or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be. Sontag, 2003: p. 42 In the next sentence Sontag describes the way these photographs force us into two categories: either we are spectators authorized by the history of religious-artistic images of horror to look, or cowards unable to behold the image. For Sontag, we might learn and reflect on systems of oppression which result in mass suffering and death and be moved to change things.Yet, we are more than likely to ignore the images or be satiated by our brief expression of sympathy and recognition that ‘we’ cannot help ‘them.’ Images of this sort still deceive and fail us; but Sontag has shifted the emphasis from the images themselves to an interrogation of the ‘us,’ our responsibility in the face of photographs that bring distant suffering and death before us. Sontag concludes Regarding the Pain of Others with a reflection on a larger-than-life photographic image of a ‘made-up event’ by Jeff Wall, ‘Dead Troops Talk (A Vision After an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol near Moqur, Afghanistan, Winter, 1986).’ Wall’s staged photograph shows dead Soviet soldiers, some mangled, others not, in various states of action. Though dead they engage in jovial play, contemplation, concern, etc. Sontag is fascinated by the extent to which the soldiers are fraternally communicating with one another. The dead are supremely uninterested in the living: in those who took their lives; in witnesses – and in us. Why should they seek our gaze? What would they have to say to us? “We” – this “we” is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through – don’t understand. We don’t get it. We truly can’t imagine what it was like. We can’t imagine. Sontag, 2003: p. 125 Sontag asserts that everyone touched by the horrors of war feels this way, and, she insists, they are right to acknowledge the gulf between the ‘we’ of war and the ‘we’ who have not experienced the same. Though Sontag regularly returns to images of war to develop her arguments, her claims broadly address all the ways we relate to the world and others through photographic images. I began this chapter with an account of Sontag’s experience with cancer, in part drawing attention to the photographs she collaborated on with Leibowitz that document her cancer treatment. I find that the images give a sense of Sontag’s participation, her yielding to her friend and lover behind the camera. There are innumerable differences between a woman choosing to make a series of images with someone she trusts, a photojournalist of war, and a photographer publishing postmortem images of those she loved. How, then, can Sontag’s claims be coherently read to not only encompass these differing forms of photographing the suffering, dying, and dead, but also to speak to the broader ways we relate to others and the world through photography? I find the beginning of an answer in one of her early works. Soon after her first diagnosis and treatment for cancer in the 1975, Sontag wrote and published Illness as Metaphor. Without acknowledging her experience with cancer directly (Reiff describes it as intentionally ‘anti-autobiographical’), Sontag compares the different ways we (primarily Americans of the last two centuries) publically relate through metaphor to diseases that

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dominate the public imagination (Rieff, 2008: p. 28). Tuberculosis was romanticized in the nineteenth century and cancer has been vilified as invader of the body throughout the twentieth. Sontag argues that relating to people with diseases in this metaphorical way – viewing as beautiful the poet consumed by consumption or taking the cancer patient to be fighting against a ‘foreign’ invasion of the body or somehow being responsible for her own cancer as a bodily manifestation of her self-repression – isolates the ill and dying in another world, the world of the sick. For Sontag, we cannot give the suffering and dying what they need if we impose a metaphorical view of this sort on their disease. In this way we find ourselves mitigating and distorting our responsibility toward them (Sontag, 1990). Sontag makes a compelling argument that relating to disease in this manner distorts our relation to those suffering and dying from these illnesses. However, it seems wrong to conclude that this captures the entirety of the problem of isolation experienced in suffering from illness. Do we not find that, apart from these metaphorical impositions, experiences of suffering and facing death themselves elicit an experience of isolation? I find myself compelled to say that suffering and facing death intensifies or exposes an ever-present sense of isolation in our everyday lives. As if they bring out and compound what is always present, or a present possibility, beneath the surface. In the conclusion of Regarding the Pain of Others Sontag writes of the gulf between those who experienced the horrors of war and the rest of us – the dead have no interest in speaking with us, no interest in witnesses. Like the notion of the world of the sick in Illness as Metaphor they live in the world of war. It is a world we can look into but from a distance we cannot share. Sontag is attempting in both of these works to interrogate the various ways we can become isolated from one another.Taking her investigation seriously does not require limiting isolation to these experiences. I take these two notions of isolation as acute symptoms indicative of a larger problem of isolation. When critiquing Woolf, Sontag found that her gendered critique of responses to images of war (and war itself) had not gone far enough, had not acknowledged the great gulf between those experiencing the horror of war and the rest of us spectators. I am afraid that Sontag herself has drawn the circle still too small. By focusing almost exclusively on war and human-caused suffering and death she seems to miss the nearly limitless ways each of us can find ourselves isolated from one another – a reality that suffering seems to show and exacerbate rather than create. Further, there is not always something we can do when faced with the death of others. Perhaps we can and should imagine stopping all war or curing most known diseases, but there is no cure for death. At some point, we can all find ourselves watching the suffering and death of others without there being anything we can do to stop it – the alternative to working to alleviate suffering is not always voyeurism. There must be a way of retaining Sontag’s warnings against complacency and inaction in the face of death – taking seriously her claims that photographs can form us into voyeurs – without denying our limits or projecting voyeurism on every act of viewing suffering and death. Exclusively attending to what we can do to stop suffering and death is just one more way of avoiding acknowledging our finitude and the inevitability of all of our deaths. Is there not hope that we can properly relate to and care for one another when there is nothing we can do to alleviate suffering and prevent death? I find that Leibovitz’s photographs of Sontag attest to both this warning and this hope, but before I return to a reading of these images in the conclusion I turn to the work of Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond on isolation and shared experience.

5  Our changed way of seeing Stanley Cavell’s engagement with the work of Susan Sontag is quite limited, but he briefly touches on her claims in an important essay on the power and glory of photography that builds 176

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on his arguments in The World Viewed. Cavell begins ‘What Photography Calls Thinking’ with an investigation of common mottoes he finds surrounding photography. His Wittgensteinian method rests on the claim that we can find out what a thing is by investigating what we say about it. To follow his excurses on photography, two related aspects of his thought are pertinent. First, we learn the world and words together. What we say about a thing is intimately tied to our lives both together with others – language is shared – and our embodied lives relating to these objects (Cavell, 2002). Abstracting language from this shared life, as Cavell argues is common in the tradition of North American analytic philosophy, not only fails to provide greater accuracy but loses the very ground of meaning necessary for this investigation. The meaning of a word is in its use, as the Wittgensteinian phrase goes, and that meaning-in-use cannot be bypassed to get at what a thing is. Thus, words and world are bound together. Second, we seem to have experienced something of a loss of this binding of the word and world. We live with fragments of concepts of a previous way of relating to the world and to others which no longer fit our current forms of embodied life. We are not sure how to understand our connection to our words, to the world, to others, to bodies, to ourselves. Thus, we find ourselves distanced and isolated. Cavell finds that ‘fashionable mottoes’ about photography are formed ‘around something like a relation to reality – as of the mind to the world’ (Cavell, 2005: p. 115). Phrases like ‘Photographs always lie’ or ‘Photography has changed the way we see’ are both important and ‘oddly empty examples’ (ibid.). Contra the notion of photography lying, Cavell insists that the ‘beauty of their nature is exactly to say nothing, neither to lie nor not to’ (Cavell, 2005: p. 116). The mechanical nature of the camera, that it captures what is in front of it automatically, means that it does not create images but captures them. Cavell elsewhere likens the camera to a typewriter; as machine, it cannot tell lies because it is not the one doing the telling.Yet, unlike a typewriter, he continues, we are regularly surprised by what we have made the camera do, what it has captured.9 The machinery that makes the photograph is not where the mysteriousness lies, ‘but in the unfathomable abyss between what it captures (its subject) and what is captured for us (this fixing of the subject), the metaphysical wait between exposure and exhibition, the absolute authority or finality of the fixed image’ (Cavell, 1979: p. 185). Cavell acknowledges that the photographer is a direct participant, but in emphasizing the automated nature of the camera and the causal role the subject plays in photography, he finds that the best a photographer can do is predict. There is always a gap, a distance between the desires of the photographer and the resulting image. The emphasis then must be on the role reality plays in this process. If photographs are dumb as Cavell insists, how did we find ourselves with mottoes claiming photographs lie, etc.? Cavell believes that with these phrases we seek to cover over an impressive range of anxieties centered on, or symptomized by, our sense of how little we know about what the photograph reveals: that we do not know what our relation to reality is, our complicity in it, that we do not know how or what to feel about those events, that we do not understand the specific transformative powers of the camera, what I have called its original violence; that we cannot anticipate what it will know of us – or show of us. Cavell, 2005: p. 116 Thus, for Cavell, asking questions about photography, questions that are not answered by these and other empty mottoes, goes hand in hand with questions about our troubled relationship with reality and the anxieties that surround it. Answering some of the former might throw light on the latter. Addressing the other common motto noted above helps connect the two: 177

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‘Photography has changed the way we see.’ Cavell speculates that most people count this as a positive development. Susan Sontag, he adds implying a reference to her early work On Photography, uniquely descries the changes brought by photography as ‘a bad thing, something to deplore, whatever praises may be due it’ (ibid.).Yet, for Cavell, the broad claim that photography has changed with way we see is something like the reverse of the truth. The remark does not explain the power of photography but assumes it. Photography could not have impressed itself so immediately and pervasively on European (including the American) mind unless that mind had at once recognized in photography a manifestation of something that had already happened to itself. ibid. Unlike Sontag, Cavell is less interested in what photography does to us and more interested in what created a longing for viewing the world and others in this manner in the first place. The immediate important claim is that if there is change in the way we see, we must look for it before the development of photography and read photography in light of this change. For Cavell we can see the mind of the West evident in the philosophical ‘fall into skepticism, together with its efforts to recover itself, events recorded variously in Descartes and Hume and Kant and Emerson and Nietzsche and Heidegger and Wittgenstein’ (ibid.). He uses the concept of skepticism to speak ‘of some new, or new realization of, human distance from the world, or some withdrawal of the world, which philosophy interprets as a limitation in our capacity for knowing the world’ (ibid.).10 Referencing The World Viewed, Cavell argues that ‘the advent of photography expresses this distance as the modern fate to relate to the world by viewing it, taking views of it, as from behind the self ’ (Cavell, 2005: pp. 116, 117).11 (The World Viewed, Cavell’s complex ‘metaphysical memoir,’ is titled after the Heideggerian concept of Weltanschauung, implying ‘that ours is an age in which our philosophical grasp of the world fails to reach beyond our taking views of it, and we call these views metaphysics’) (Cavell, 1979: p. xxiii). Philosophy, Cavell contends, is still wrestling with the question of skepticism – our experience of isolation from others and the world. Photography is bound up in these same concepts, and thus the exploration of the meaning of photography is tied to the same particular set of questions and anxieties as philosophy, and as such they have great anthropological import. We can therefore take these mottoes as fragments of the past which function as an evasion of the more important question: What is a photograph? One further description of Cavell’s thought will help us follow his discussion of the power and glory of photography. Reiterating a concept from The World Viewed which strengthens Sontag’s ontology and in part coincides with the recent work of Kaja Silverman, Cavell writes that ‘film proposes an artistically unheard of relation between the presence and absence of its objects’ (Cavell, 2005: p. 117). The photograph does not work the way we commonly understand representation. The object we see is not standing in for something else, is not a likeness of something. When we see a photograph of a person, a loved one for example, we want to say in some way, ‘That is her.’ We know we are not looking at a flesh and blood human being, and we acknowledge we are seeing a photograph. Nevertheless, the subject of the photograph is in some way before us. It would make little sense to look at this photograph of the loved one and say, ‘That is not her.’ (Unless we wanted to call out a sense of longing for her physical presence which would only confirm Cavell’s claims.) The subject of the photograph, Cavell argues, participates in the image in an ontological way that is not so with other forms of visual art (painting, etc.). Thus,

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the object or person is in some manner present before us while simultaneously being absent. Perhaps we would want to say, ‘It is her, but it isn’t her.’ In this strange space between presence and absence we are not sure how the subject of the image relates to the image produced.We are not used to seeing things that are not present before us. It is inherent in our conception of seeing, Cavell continues, that what we see is before us. But the photograph does just that: it shows us what is not present (Cavell, 1979: p. 17). In this way photographs confirm what Cavell calls the threat or truth of skepticism – skepticism’s starting point – that we cannot secure our relation to the world and others. This is the nature of our human finitude. It is the limits of who we are, limits Cavell finds with Wittgenstein we are always longing to escape, to transcend. Facing our finitude always entails facing our death. Working from Cavell’s critique of philosophical moral arguments, Cora Diamond begins her essay on the difficulty of reality with a reflection on a photograph which trades on the historied connection between photography and death. More accurately, she begins with an account of the poem ‘Six Young Men’ by Ted Hughes, which itself is a reflection on a photograph of genial young men taken months before they all perish in The Great War. Hughes, if we might take the voice of the poem to be his own, expresses a feeling of radical displacement when looking at the image of the lively young men he knows have been deceased for decades. They are alive before our eyes; we can see their ‘celluloid smiles’ as they sit in the clearing. We can imagine them listening to the sounds of the wind blowing in the trees and waterfall in the distance.We can imagine the warmth of the sun beating down upon their faces.Yet, Hughes proceeds, we simultaneously see their death, their ‘smoking blood.’ His final lines pin the feeling of displacement back on us as readers: To regard this photograph might well dement, Such contradictory permanent horrors here Smile from the single exposure and shoulder out One’s own body from its instant and heat. Hughes, 1957: p. 55 In this photograph, he insists, they are alive as much as anyone else we may now embrace. In the image, they are no less dead, final, and past than any ‘prehistoric or, fabulous beast’ now gone. Seeing both, Diamond reflects, shoulders Hughes out of his own body. Her interest in addressing the poem lies in following ‘the experience of the mind’s not being able to encompass something which it encounters’ (Diamond, 2008: p. 44). Some might just as easily look at the same image and find nothing confounding.We can imagine that in viewing the photograph and reading the poem, some might wonder what Hughes means. It is a photograph of men who died.They are smiling because when the photograph was taken they were alive and happy. While others, Diamond finds evident, are brought to the brink of insanity trying to take thought of what is before them:‘the impossibility of anyone’s being more alive than these smiling men, nothing’s being more dead’ (ibid.). The difficulty of reality is experienced when we ‘take something in reality to be resistant to our thinking it, or possibly to be painful in its inexplicability, difficult in that way, or perhaps awesome and astonishing in its inexplicability’ (Diamond, 2008: pp. 45, 46). Diamond follows this description with the emphatic claim, ‘We take things so.’ This is the kind of animal we are. The radical divergent responses to reality, where one person finds it too difficult to take in and another finds it perfectly acceptable, demonstrates that being human entails the ability to take reality differently. We are both looking at the same image. There is nothing in the image that we are missing – it is all before us.Thus, Diamond finds, more knowledge will not rectify the difference. No amount of description or abstract argumentation will reconcile us.

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6 Conclusion This chapter began with the question of the nature of photography and its relation to human finitude. In what ways do we take photographic portraits to convey death? In what manner do we find the images to carry our presence, our lives where we are not and when we are not? What do we make of the strange promise of a photographic afterlife? I framed the conversation by addressing the divergent ways one can take photographic images, particularly postmortem photographs which seem to only convey death, arguing that they can also convey life. To investigate our relation to these photographs I turned to the work of Susan Sontag. Sontag links the discussion of the ontology of photography to our ethical relation to others. She warns of the ways in which photography fosters voyeurism and satiates us into complacency. Further, she finds that almost any ethical argument can be drawn from a photographic image. I concluded my engagement with Sontag’s writing as she concludes hers, with an account of the ways in which the sufferings of war (and preventable death) isolates. However, I take this isolation to be exacerbated and revealed by these circumstances, not created. I relied here on the work of Cavell who argues that photography materializes the already pervasive experience of absenting ourselves from others and the world, an experience which leads to isolation. By reflecting on this reality through the photograph, there is hope that it can be otherwise, hope that we are not condemned to isolation. Further, I argued that Sontag’s emphasis on suffering and death which can be alleviated wrongly neglects the limits of our humanity.There is not always something we can do; viewing those suffering, dying, and dead need not always lead to voyeurism. I end with a note of hope I find in Cora Diamond’s description of the difficulty of reality. Her declaration that we humans are the kind of animals who take things in radically divergent ways is not limited to being struck by horror and wounded as we find death in images of life such as the six lively young men. As she notes in her work, we can also find ourselves struck by beauty. Just as we can see death in images of life, so too may we find beauty and life even in images of the dying and the dead. By acknowledging the possibility that others, that we, may see life in images of death, we open the possibility of the photograph to carry ourselves where and when we are not, to carry our lives after our lives, knowing that these claims are less about the ontology of photography and more about our nature as those who relate to others through photographs. Key words: postmortem photography, ethics of death and dying, ontology, Susan Sontag, Stanley Cavell

Notes 1 Kaja Silverman argues that these conversations are often limited to a view of the camera as either an aggressive tool we use to construct and secure our vision, or a competing view that emphasizes photography’s semiotic indexicality, the evidentiary nature of the image which shows us the reality of what has been – a sign pointing to the absent referent. Both perspectives, she concludes, are attempts to attain certainty in response to the metaphysics of Cartesian doubt. Since Silverman finds that both fail to provide a convincing account of the nature of photography. 2 Leibovitz has apparently not adjusted the white balance of the digital images, leaving a color tone that one would not see if one simply gazed at it with the naked eye. 3 See www.nowilaymedowntosleep.org. 4 Not all Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep photographs are postmortem, they also entail photographs of families embracing infants in the last hours of their lives. 5 www.nowilaymedowntosleep.org/about/mission-and-history/ 6 On postmodernism and the erosion of meaning, see Sontag (2000).

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Photographing human finitude 7 Woolf declares to her reader that the same words of ‘horror and disgust . . . rise on both our lips. . . . For now at least,’ she continues, ‘we are looking at the same picture’ (Woolf, 1966: p. 10). 8 In a similar vein, Sontag critiques – without acknowledging as such – her own previous implications from On Photography when she writes, ‘Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching. But watching up close – without the mediation of an image – is still just watching’ (Sontag, 2003: p. 117). 9 Cavell is evidently discussing the distance between taking images on a film camera and developing this film in analog photography. I am convinced that his arguments apply in a complex and related manner to the technological shifts in this medium (‘live view’ image capture), but that argument is for another time. For a related discussion that touches on Computer Generated Imagery in film and Cavell’s arguments, see Shuster (2015). 10 Descartes, Hume, and Kant roughly express the fall into skepticism while Emerson, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein roughly show us attempts to recover ourselves from this fall. 11 Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein say that we are ‘ “away” from the world’; Heidegger calls this ‘distance,’ while others speak of ‘alienation.’

Further reading Barthes, R. (2010) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by R. Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. Barthes’s philosophical reflections on photography establishes and emphasizes a connection with the medium and death. Cavell, S. (2005) Cavell on Film. Edited by W. Rothman. New York: State University of New York Press. This collection of Cavell’s writings on film, and photography as its basis, demonstrates his Wittgensteinian philosophical method where exploring the nature of the medium requires attending to its use. Ruby, J. (1995) Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ruby provides a contemporary and historical anthropological account of photographic portraits and their relation to death in America culture. Silverman, K. (2015) The Miracle of Analogy or The History of Photography, Part I. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Silverman’s alternative to prevalent ontologies of photography offers an analogical account where the subject of the photograph participates in the image both as presence (showing forth life and being) and absence. Sontag, S. (2001) On Photography. New York: Picador. In On Photography, Sontag nuances her previous work, investigating the ethical implications of relating to those facing death and the dead through photography.

Bibliography Barthes, R. (2010) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang. Bazin, A. (2004) What Is Cinema? Volume 1. Translated by H. Gray. 2nd Edition. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cavell, S. (1979) The World Viewed. Enlarged Edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cavell, S. (2002) Must We Mean What We Say? Updated Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cavell, S. (2005) Cavell on Film. Edited by W. Rothman. New York: State University of New York Press. Diamond, C. (2008) ‘The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy’, in: Stanley Cavell, C., Diamond, C., McDowell, J., Hacking, I., and Wolfe, C. Philosophy and Animal Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Hughes, T. (1957) The Hawk in the Rain. London: Farber. Leibovitz, A. (2006) A Photographer’s Life: 1990–2005. New York: Random House. Malkowski, J. (2017) Dying in Full Detail: Mortality and Digital Documentary. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep (2017) ‘Mission and History,’ [online]. Available at: www.nowilaymedown tosleep.org/about/mission-and-history/.

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Mathew A. Crawford Rieff, D. (2008) Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks. Ruby, J. (1995) Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Shuster, M. (2015) ‘The Ordinariness and Absence of the World: Cavell’s Ontology of the Screen – Reading The World Viewed,’ Project Muse MLN, 130(5), pp. 1067–1099. Silverman, K. (2015) The Miracle of Analogy or the History of Photography, Part I. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Sontag, S. (1990) Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors. New York: Picador. Sontag, S. (2000) ‘A Photograph Is Not an Opinion. Or Is It?,’ in: Leibovitz, A. and Sontag, S. Women. New York: Random House. Sontag, S. (2001) On Photography. New York: Picador. Susan, S. (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Woolf,V. (1966) Three Guineas. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, Inc.

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15 DE IMAGO TO WORD The exile of the dead from parish symbolism in Reformation England Lacy K. Crocker Papadakis

1 Introduction Since the 1970s, significant works have been published on iconoclasm in sixteenth-century England (Phillips, 1973; Eire, 1986; Aston, 1988; Davidson and Nichols, 1989). Eamon Duffy’s influential monograph The Stripping of the Altars (2005) has shifted the discussion by resculpting the vitality of late medieval English Catholicism and by showing the shattering destruction of religious symbolism from 1530 until about 1580. These robust studies have prompted me to examine the place of the dead in parish life in sixteenth-century England as the religious scene transitioned its primary medium of communicating religious beliefs de imago to word.1 In this chapter, I will argue that the transition in medium also resulted in the exile of the dead from parish life. This study will focus on the role and the removal of art forms and symbolism that relate to the Passion of Christ, Mary, and the saints. I will also analyze the place of death for the individual parishioner through the use of the bede-roll, the prayers for the soul, and the eventual silencing of these prayers during the English Reformation. Bede-rolls were lists of benefactors delineating the items they bequeathed to the parish (Marshall, 2002: p. 24). Bede-rolls were read annually in full, and the priests read a shortened form weekly during Sunday mass (Marshall, 2002: p. 24). I will chart the transitions from art to word by analyzing the records of the churchwardens from St. Mary’s Church in Mildenhall in Suffolk, England, dated from 1503–1553, which appears in a volume edited by Judith Middleton-Stewart (2011).While this chapter will primarily address the use and disuse of images and imagery, I will also analyze the transition from the Latin oral tradition, namely the Paternoster, Ave Maria, and the Credo, to English oral tradition. I will highlight the prioritization of the Ten Commandments and the Creed by the reformers in place of the Ave Maria, demonstrating the demise of the Virgin as teacher and mediator. This chapter draws upon Protestant writings of the period (including writings by Bishop and reformer John Hooper, writings addressed to Elizabeth I, and Certain Sermons or Homilies Appointed to Be Read in Churches in the Time of Queen Elizabeth of Famous Memory) that elucidate the theological impetus for the removal of art and the cessation of certain religious practices. I will synthesize how these theological beliefs altered the place of the dead both visually and doctrinally in parish life in sixteenth-century England. This synthesis will show a distancing from Christ’s death, a sharper distinction between the living and the dead, and a contraction of the corporate church’s size as the dead were exiled to the 183

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afterlife and were removed from the practices of the corporate church. The changes in the mass (both in art forms and doctrine) made Christ’s death historically more distant for parishioners who formerly experienced Christ’s death through the mass or by meditating on the art that depicted the Passion of Christ. The images and representations of Mary and the saints were an active part of parish life because parishioners viewed them as mediators and teachers. The loss of the images of Mary and the saints created a more distinct separation between the living and the dead, and it represented a shrinking of the corporate church. The bede-roll and quetheword (prayers for the soul) can be likened to the concrete images of the saints because through these practices parishioners lived on after their death and remained a part of the living corporate church.The silencing of such practices, like the removal of the images of Mary and the saints, effectively contracted the corporate church and resulted in an exile of the dead from parish life to the afterlife.

2  Passion of Christ The records of the churchwardens from St. Mary’s Church during the sixteenth century detail the wills of the parishioners and how money was gifted and spent. These accounts show the effects of the early years of the English Reformation on one parish.2 Many of these records were written in Latin, which Middleton-Stewart (2011) helpfully translates into English.3 The rood (or crucifix) and rood loft (or choir loft) feature prominently in the records dated to the early part of the sixteenth century. The first such reference dates to 1505 and appears in Latin. It says, ‘[m]emorandum that Paul, the vicar of the church, gave for painting the solar of the Holy Rood in the same church’ (Middleton-Stewart, 2011: p. 44). The solar is the painted canopy above the rood (Middleton-Stewart, 2011: p. 195). The churchwardens’ accounts dated 1505–1506 indicate that major refurbishments were about to begin on the rood loft as represented by the following records: ‘[i]tem payd for stageyng of the rodelofte’ and ‘[i]tem payd to the alybaster man for the rode lofte peytyng’ (Middleton-Stewart, 2011: pp. 45, 46). Alabaster was commonly used for religious carvings in cathedrals and monasteries in England, however the English Reformation led to the destruction or sale of many of these religious carvings (Cheetham, 2003: p. 1). In fact, more English alabaster carvings can be found in Normandy today than in England or any other location (Cheetham, 2003: p. 5). The iconoclastic measures were so comprehensive that the concept of English alabaster carvings went unknown until the late nineteenth century when scholars established the English origin of some alabaster carvings found in Europe (Cheetham, 2003: p. 5). Panels of alabaster carvings decorated the altarpieces and the front of the rood loft (Cheetham, 2003: p. 4). Family tombs of prominent townspeople also featured alabaster carvings, and these managed to survive the iconoclasm of the English Reformation, continuing into the seventeenth century (Cheetham, 2003: p. 7). The Mildenhall records do not detail what types of images were carved onto the front of the rood loft. It is possible that the rood loft reflected one of the themes found on altarpieces with alabaster panels. By the mid-fifteenth century common themes included the Passion of Christ (Betrayal, Flagellation, Crucifixion, Entombment, and Resurrection), the Joys of the Virgin (Annunciation, Adoration of the Magi, Ascension, Assumption, and Coronation), and the Lives of the Saints (St. Catherine, St. John the Baptist [particularly his head], and St. James the Great) (Cheetham, 2003: pp. 9–11). Significant changes took place in Mildenhall by 1549.The records show payment for the following: Item payd to Hynd that take down the rode lofte Item payd to a man for 3 dayes worke for pullynge downe off the altores and other worke in the church, hys wages and borde 184

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Item payd to masun for pavynge of the churche and other worke there Item payd for bearynge awaye of the stone and menor in the church and making clene of the stone Middleton-Stewart, 2011: p. 110 As these records indicate, the English Reformation brought significant visual alterations to St. Mary’s Church. The rood loft was taken down, and the altar was destroyed and replaced with wooden tables (Middleton-Stewart, 2011: p. 110).These terse, factual accounts sharply contrast with the vitality and centrality that these items once represented in the church.The removal of the rood loft and the altar redirect the focus from the place of death in parish life. Both the rood loft and the altar served as a focal point of worship prior to their removal, and both focused the worshiper on the death of Christ.The rood loft was a place for the choir, but it was also how the rood (crucifix) was accessed. The crucifix was covered on Good Friday and then uncovered on Easter Sunday, making access to it important. Likely, the crucifix and the rood loft were removed at the same time. The removal of both the rood loft and the altar did not reflect a denial of Christ’s death, but rather evinced a transformation of its meaning and place in the church. Both of these images represented Christ’s death and sacrifice and both were at the forefront of the church. Duffy notes, ‘[t]he Crucifix was the icon of Christ’s abiding solidarity with suffering humanity’ (2005: p. 237).The Latin prayer in the Horae (Hours of the Blessed Mary), prayed after communion shows the connection between Christ’s suffering and humanity’s suffering (Wordsworth, 1920: p. 127, translation is my own): This Latin prayer appears reprinted in a collection of prayers that date back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in England. This prayer – ‘Anima Christi’ – is referred to as ‘at the leuation of our Lord’ in the Sarum Horae of 1494 and ‘at the elevation of the sacrament’ in the Sarum Primers of 1538 (Wordsworth, 1920: p. 127). The ‘Anima Christi’ shows the significance of Christ’s Passion. Christ’s death brought comfort to his people, during their life and at their hour of death. They sought refuge from their own suffering and from the evils of the world in Christ’s wounds and sufferings as this prayer demonstrates. The rood, rood loft, and the altar all visually represented this comfort and refuge both in life and death (particularly the crucifix in death). The removal of these items de-emphasized the death of Christ. The removal of the rood and rood loft, as well as the replacement of the altar with a table reflected a theological shift from the focus on Christ’s death to his resurrection. Bishop and

Latin prayer

Translation

Anima Christi, sanctifica me. Corpus Christi, salua me. Sanguis Christis, inebria me. Aqua lateris Christi, laua me. Splendor vultus Christi, conforta me. Passio Christi, conforta me. Bone Jesu, exaudi me. In vulnerisbus tuis absconde me. Ab hoste malign defende. In hora mortis mee voca me, protege me, et pone me iuxta te: vt cum sanctis angelis tuis in secula seculorum laudem te. Amen.

Spirit of Christ, sanctify me. Body of Christ, save me. Blood of Christ, drench me. Water from the side of Christ, wash me. The brilliance of the face of Christ, comfort me. Passion of Christ, comfort me. O’ Good Jesus, hear me. Hide me in your wounds. From the evil enemy guard me. In the hour of my death call me, protect me, and set me beside you: so that I may praise you with your holy angels for all eternity. Amen.

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reformer John Hooper in his A Declaration of Christ and His Office rejects the use of the crucifix as a teaching aid on the basis that it is dead and cannot represent the resurrection of Christ.4 He writes: The ploughman, be he never so unlearned, shall better be instructed of Christ’s death and passion by the corn5 that he soweth in the field, and likewise of Christ’s resurrection than by all the dead posts that hang in the church. 6 1843: p. 45 Here, Hooper argues that hanging a crucifix in a church or bringing it out of the sepulcher at Easter is not even a good metaphor for Christ’s resurrection because the wood is dead and cannot represent life. He believes that the Passion of Christ and his resurrection should be taught, but not by this visual aid. He goes on to propose a Biblical metaphor: If any preacher would manifest the resurrection of Christ unto the senses, why doth not he teach them by the grain of the field that is risen out of the earth and cometh of the dead corn that he sowed in the winter? Why doth not the preacher preach the death and resurrection of Christ by such figures and metaphors as the scripture teacheth? . . . A dead post carried [in] a procession as much resembleth the resurrection of Christ, as very death resembleth life. 1843: pp. 45, 46 Hooper’s argument is simple: that which is dead cannot teach life. The ploughman needs to be taught about Christ’s Passion, but he needs to be taught it in connection with Christ’s resurrection. Hooper’s discourse portrays the transition from image to word as well as the theological shift from the focus on Christ’s death to the emphasis on his resurrection. The mass and the use of the altar during it constituted Christ’s sacrifice, making Christ’s sacrifice a present reality at each mass. Protestants rejected the Catholic view of transubstantiation.7 Additionally, Protestants abhorred the concept that Christ was being repeatedly sacrificed in the mass.8 Hooper writes, If they sacrifice Christ in the mass, let them hang him [like] tyrants again upon the cross, and thrust a spear to his blessed heart, that he may shed his blood; for “without shedding of blood is no remission.” The scripture damneth this abuse of the Lord’s supper, and is the conculcation9 of his precious blood. 1843: p. 61 The Catholic mass and altar evoked an intensity of emotion in Hooper because in his view these practices went against scripture as Hooper cites Heb 10:14 in his discussion on the mass, ‘Christ by one sacrifice made perfect all things’ (1843: p. 60). Christ’s sacrifice was not to be repeated. It was sufficient. For the reformers, the replacement of the altar with the communion table signified a movement away from the need for sacrifice toward a remembrance of the sacrifice, which happened once in history. The reformers saw this transition from altar to table as a movement from an Old Testament need to a New Testament reality. They presented this argument before Elizabeth I in order to encourage her to remove the altars and replace them with communion tables. An anonymous manuscript addressed to the queen describes the altar as ‘convenient for the olde testament to be a figure of Christes bloude sacrifice vpon [the] Crosse,’ whereas the 186

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table represented the New Testament ministration of the Lord’s Supper (Guinn-Chipman, 2013: p. 81). As with the rood and rood loft, a transformation in the meaning of Christ’s death occurs. For the reformers, Christ’s death is not to be performed again and again through the mass because it was finished once and for all at a point in history; rather, it is to be remembered for the merit it has wrought. Hence, Christ’s death becomes historically more distant from parishioners who formerly experienced Christ’s death through the mass.

3  Mary and the saints Just as the churchwardens’ records provided information regarding the refurbishment and removal of the rood loft at St. Mary’s Church at Mildenhall, the wills from the area also give us an idea of other images once present in the church. St. Mary’s Church once had an image of ‘the most glorious Virgin Mary’ situated to the north of the altar and to the south side of the altar was a statue of St. John the Evangelist to which a tabernacle was gifted (Middleton-Stewart, 2011: p. 157). These two figures were very common for this time period and often were placed on opposites sides of the rood. Records also indicate that the church paid for a crown for the statue of the Virgin Mary. The rood beam depicted a painting of the Virgin, demonstrating her importance to the congregants (Middleton-Stewart, 2011: p. 48). St. Mary’s Church incorporated other saints as well. The records at Mildenhall provide informative details about the saints present in the church (either in the form of a statue, painting, window pane, or carving). Two pre-Reformation accounts reference three pictures of St. Gregory (Middleton-Stewart, 2011: p. 127). The statues of the saints commonly wore clothes. In 1508 the church purchased a girdle for St. Thomas in order to tie up his liturgical garments (Middleton-Stewart, 2011: p. 189). The Homilies, a collection of sermons printed in 1562, contains Protestant attacks on the practice of clothing the saints, and Elizabeth I ordered that these sermons be read in church (Church of England, 1864). One sermon references an early Christian writer, saying, ‘as little girls play with little puppets, so be these decked images great puppets for old fools to play with’ (Church of England, 1864: p. 275). The homilist goes on to compare this practice to the pagan idolatry of the gentiles (Church of England, 1864: pp. 275, 276). In 1548 the church paid to have the church murals whitewashed. The whitewashing of the church and the loss of the images of Mary and the saints, represent a shrinking of the corporate church. The parish life and community included Mary and the saints, but the removal of these images created a greater separation between the living and the dead.

4 The image of the deceased Regular parishioners did not transcend death like Mary and the saints in the form of images, but they lived on after their death in the parish through the bede-roll and quetheword (or the prayers for the souls). While less concrete than the images of Christ, Mary, and the saints, the bede-roll and quetheword symbolized the continued life of the deceased within the parish community. The churchwarden’s accounts record the prayers ‘for the soul’ or the quetheword (or beqweth) as income because a legacy typically accompanied them.10 They were similar to the bede-roll, which was discontinued during Edward’s reign (MiddletonStewart, 2001: p. 203). Duffy places great weight on the importance of the bede-roll. He regards them as a social map of the community, often stretching over centuries, and promising a continuing place in the consciousness of the parish in which he or she had once lived, not 187

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as one of the anonymous multitude of the dead, but as the named provider of some familiar object. 2005: p. 33511 The quetheword appears on an average of six to seven times a year in the Mildenhall records from 1500–1544. The accounts of 1543–1544 record the last quetheword (or beqweth) (Middleton-Stewart, 2011). Middleton-Stewart notes that by 1546–1547 the quetheword is termed a legacy and there is no further reference to the souls of the dead. Thus, the removal of the saints also led to the removal of the prayer for the dead, demonstrating a contracting of the corporate church and an exile of the dead from parish life to the afterlife.

5  Role of images in the church One could argue that the Catholic Church in England had the scriptures, at least portions of them, and important church traditions in the vernacular of the people prior to the Reformation. The vernacular was not the written English word, but the various forms of images and imagery that depicted Biblical stories as well as key beliefs held by the church. This perspective is not new. During the sixth century, Pope Gregory I defended the use of images by calling them the libri pauperum (‘books of the poor’). Because of low literacy during sixteenth-century England, images and imagery proved more accessible mediums to communicate religious beliefs. Hence, pictorial representations, not the written English word, were the vernacular of the majority of English people during this period. Reformers had varying views on the use of images as teaching aids (Protestants still disagree on this). The reformers’ interpretation and the numbering of the Ten Commandments affected their views on the use of images as teaching aids (Aston, 1988: p. 373). The first negative statement in the Ten Commandments prohibits having other gods. The next negative statement prohibits the creation and worship of images.Those who grouped these prohibitions together as the first commandment generally accepted images as teaching aids (Aston, 1988: p. 373). Those who separated these prohibitions into two commandments generally opposed images as teaching aids (Aston, 1988: p. 373). Reformer John Hooper separated the command against creating images and worshiping them as the second commandment in his discourse titled A Declaration of the Ten Commandments (1843: pp. 316–322). Hooper discusses the second commandment and specifically addresses the role of the images as teachers: that they [idols] are appointed in many places to be as doctors to teach the people; these doctors and doctrine the bishops and pastors shall bewail before the judgmentseat of God at the hour of death. p. 321 Hence, Hooper rejected the images of Christ, Mary, and the saints as teachers (or doctors of the church) because the message they taught conflicted with Hooper’s interpretation of scripture. Apart from teaching aids, what role did images play in the church? Aston asserts, ‘[i]n the later middle ages it was accepted by the church that Christians should not only learn their faith through visual representation, but should also express their faith through reverencing these’ (1988: p. 21). In some ways, the images were alive because the distinction between the image and whom it represented was blurred (Aston, 1988: p. 33). This life attributed to the image by the worshiper enabled the image to serve as a mediator between God and the laity, paralleling the 188

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relationship between the priest and a congregant. Perhaps, the image provided a more mystical experience than the priest for the lay member.This life and priestly function of the images were tantamount to idolatry of the ancients and saints for the reformers. In Hooper’s view, the devil set up the idols in the church in order to draw people away from God (1843: p. 45). While I have focused on imagery in the Catholic Church of England, the use of the Latin oral tradition deserves mention. Duffy calls the Paternoster, Ave Maria, and the Credo the ‘irreducible core of a more elaborate catechetical programme for the laity’ (2005: p. 53). The movement from the Latin to English oral tradition reflected a move from the sacred to the common and represents a verbal parallel to the removal of images in the church. Likewise catechisms centered on the Ten Commandments replaced the devotional use of the Ave Maria, also paralleling the demise of the image of the Virgin as teacher and mediator (Aston, 1988: p. 347). Art in Catholicism served in some sense as a mediator between the parish and God, in a way analogous to the mediatorial role of the priest. Reformers sought to do away with such mediation, and the change in mediums to communicate religious beliefs created a fissure between art and religion. This fissure resulted in the removal of the dead from parish life as the reformers de-emphasized the corporate nature of the parish (both living and dead) and stressed the individual response to the Word of God in place of ritual and art.

6 Conclusion This chapter shows that the dramatic shift from visual mediums to word-based mediums resulted in a significant transformation of the place of death in the parish. The death of Christ was diminished in order to exalt the resurrection of Christ. Mary and the saints were dismissed from their teaching posts (from the perspective of Catholics) and were returned to their historical setting. The Word of God rightfully took back the teaching post (from the perspective of Protestants). Deceased congregants were symbolically laid to rest again along with the bede-roll and quetheword.The visible corporate church contracted as art and the dead were extinguished from parish life. Protestants too saw their iconoclasm as exiling death from the church but in a very different manner. For Protestants, they exchanged the path to death by way of idols for the path to life by way of God’s Word. Key words: iconoclasm, death as art, Protestantism, images, Reformation

Notes 1 For those interested in a comprehensive study of theological shifts regarding the dead in reformation England see Marshall (2002). Marshall examines the impact of the English Reformation on the dead, including the concept of purgatory and prayers for the dead. 2 I have chosen to focus on the records of one parish to avoid redundancy and to devote attention to how a particular parish was affected by these reforms. Not all parishes were affected in the same way.To balance this approach, I will also describe other types of artwork not mentioned in these records that were present in other parishes during this period. 3 Middleton-Stewart’s edited volume (2011) contains English translations of many documents originally written in Latin. Some accounts were written in English, and Middleton-Stewart did not alter the spelling of those records. 4 Hooper (usually Hoper or Houper) was Oxford trained and subsequently entered the monastic life. When the monasteries were closed, he moved to Zurich and was influenced by Bullinger. He returned to England in 1548 and preached his reform ideals to large congregations before becoming the bishop of Gloucester. He was burned at the stake under the Marian regime in 1555. He produced A Declaration of Christ and His Office, which was first published in Zurich in 1547. Apparently, the first publisher lacked a good grasp of English, thus resulting in many errors. The second edition was published by

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Lacy K. Crocker Papadakis Christopher Rosdell in 1582 in London with (many) corrections and all Latin usages were translated into English. The two editions have been collated in this volume to correct the errors, however translations and other changes by Rosdell have either been footnoted or presented as marginal notes (see Hooper, 1843). I will provide Rosdell’s Latin translations when necessary in subsequent footnotes. 5 ‘Corn’ can be a term for ‘seed’ or a general term for ‘grain.’ Here it indicates the ‘seed.’ 6 His place is made in peace. 7 I am not going to discuss transubstantiation in full or differing Protestant views. This section will focus on these views in so far as they relate to the removal of the altar. McClain illustrates the anxiety English Catholics felt as Protestant England rejected transubstantiation, parallel to that of Mary Magdalene when she discovered Christ’s empty tomb (2007). Interpretations of the meaning of the Eucharist abound.Wandel examines Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed traditions of the Eucharist and the development of these views (2006). 8 ‘The liturgy lay at the heart of medieval religion, and the Mass lay at the heart of the liturgy. In the Mass the redemption of the world, wrought on Good Friday once and for all, was renewed and made fruitful for all who believed’ (Duffy, 2005: p. 92). Duffy explains the richness and significance of the mass for medieval Catholics (2005: pp. 92–130). 9 Christopher Rosdell who produced the second edition suggests ‘as the conculcation’ or ‘treading under foot’ (Hooper, 1843: p. 61). 10 The phrase ‘for the soul’ was used in the fifteenth century, but the technical term ‘quetheword’ was adopted in the sixteenth century. Beqweth was also used in place of quetheword. Quetheword is the announcement of the death of a parishioner that typically included a legacy for the church and a request for commemorative prayer. 11 Marshall challenges Duffy’s view by arguing that the bede-roll had been ‘commodified’ (2002: p. 38).

Further reading Aston, M. (1988) England’s Iconoclasts. New York: Oxford University Press. Aston demonstrates the influence of iconoclasm on English society in the sixteenth century. Duffy, E. (2005) The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400–c.1580. 2nd Edition. New Haven; London:Yale University Press. Duffy illustrates the abrupt and violent departure in fifteenth-century England from a vibrant faith in Catholicism.

Bibliography Aston, M. (1988) England’s Iconoclasts. New York: Oxford University Press. Cheetham, F. W. (2003) Alabaster Images of Medieval England. Rochester, NY: Boydell Press. Church of England (1864) Certain Sermons or Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches in the Time of Queen Elizabeth of Famous Memory. London: Printed for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Davidson, C. and Nichols, A. E. (1989) Iconoclasm vs. art and drama (Vol. 11). Kalamazoo, MI:Western Michigan University, Medieval Institute Publications. Duffy, E. (2005) The Stripping of the altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400–c.1580. 2nd Edition. New Haven ; London:Yale University Press. Eire, C. M. N. (1986) War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin. New York: Cambridge University Press. Guinn-Chipman, S. (2013) Religious Space in Reformation England: Contesting the Past. Religious Cultures in the Early Modern World, 9. Brookfield,VT: Pickering & Chatto. Hooper, J. (1843) Early Writings of John Hooper. Edited by S. Carr. Cambridge: University Press. McClain, L. (2007) ‘ “They Have Taken Away My Lord”: Mary Magdalene, Christ’s Missing Body, and the Mass in Reformation England,’ Sixteenth Century Journal, 38(1), pp. 77–96. Marshall, P. (2002) Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Middleton-Stewart, J. (2001) Inward Purity and Outward Splendour: Death and Remembrance in the Deanery of Dunwich, Suffolk, 1370–1547. Rochester, NY: Boydell Press. Middleton-Stewart, J. (ed). (2011) Records of the Churchwardens of Mildenhall: Collections (1446–1454) and Accounts (1503–1553). Suffolk Records Society,Volume LIV. Rochester, NY: Boydell.

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De imago to word Phillips, J. (1973) The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 1535–1660. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Wandel, L. P. (2006) The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wordsworth, C. (1920) Horae Eboracenses: The Prymer or Hours of the Blessed Virgin Mary According to the Use of the Illustrious Church of York; With Other Devotions as They Were Used by the Lay-Folk in the Northern Province in the XVth and XVIth Centuries. London: Andrews & Co.

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PART IV

Youth meets death A juxtaposition

16 THE COMPREHENSION OF DEATH AND AFTERLIFE IN CHILDREN Ramiro Tau

1 Introduction The awareness of human death – of one’s own and others’ – implies a cognitive and affective challenge that has moved generations of thinkers from all times and places of the world to reflect on subjects such as inevitability, time, and identity. It is one of those few large bordering topics one can never be indifferent to. Such as the total and ultimate problems of existence ‘they not only scratch the epidermis: they tear our being apart and penetrate it intimately,’ to the point where ‘their solution, clearly determined or barely anticipated, depends on the ulterior course of our existence, its happiness or sorrow’ (Pucciarelli and Frondizi, 1938: p. 7, our translation). Death constitutes the touchstone of numerous philosophical systems (Barry, 2007) due to its centrality among human facts, whether we are referring to the definition of death in general terms – the cessation or disintegration of any phenomenon – or specifically to the definition of human death. Plato stated that philosophy is a meditation of death. ‘Every philosophical life,’ wrote Cicero, ‘is a commentatio mortis.’ Twenty centuries later, Santayana affirmed that ‘a good way of proving the caliber of a certain philosophy is to ask about its assertions on death’ (Ferrater Mora, 1965: p. 238, our translation). Doubt, as a human condition, inaugurates the explicit and conscious possibility for thought to reflect on itself, given that it is not the world which is judged but our knowledge about it; more so, knowledge and its sources. The far end of this doubt is constituted by extreme situations (Carpio, 1997). These situations we cannot get out of or alter, such as death or fate, teach us what it is to fail, every time reason cannot reduce these fundamental and constitutive borders of what is human (Jaspers, 1950). In our daily lives, ‘we frequently run away from them, closing our eyes and pretending they do not exist’ (Jaspers, 1950: p. 33, our translation), although they are not less effective when it comes to eliciting the meanings that surround them without ever being able to attain them. The role of death in the configuration of ontology is unquestionable, and the meanings ascribed to the being are always marked by ‘cessation.’ In turn, the conceptions of the world are usually linked to the evaluation of the margins of the different layers of reality. Wherever we look, the omnipresence of finitude reminds us it belongs to the domain of philosophy, where death is an object of notable reflection and, at the same time, the condition of the thematization of subjects distant to the topic of death. 195

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But at the same time, psychology and other humanistic disciplines have addressed the cessation of life and especially the effects of the consciousness of this unavoidable condition, its psychological representation, or the impossibility of the latter. For the most part, psychoanalysis and clinical psychology have been interested in the affective processes that surround the end of life and grief. Now, what does the consciousness of death mean? What is death as an object to be known? How and when is knowledge about one’s own and others’ death built? In the present chapter, we will not refer to scientific, philosophical, or religious knowledge regarding death, but we will discuss some common sensible ideas and representations that children construct spontaneously about death in their daily interactions. For this, we will base our statements on the results of a study conducted in Argentina, with children between the ages of 5 and 10 years old, from sociocultural middle-class segments, and religious (Catholic), agnostic, and atheist families (Tau, 2016). We have tried there to explore the development of the subjects’ knowledge, in the complex process leading to the comprehension of human death.

2  Death as an object of knowledge: a virtual point between two moments As an object to be known, death is mostly a social type of knowledge (Castorina, 2005; Delval, 1997). The reason for this assertion can be found in the fact that even biological knowledge regarding the body is produced within a general worldview of life, existence, and time, belonging to a specific socio-cultural context. Death is a complex object that is part of the social construction of reality (Baudrillard, 1980; Berger, Luckmann and Zuleta, 1968; Rosengren, Gutiérrez and Schein, 2014; Tau and Lenzi, 2009) and that cannot be reduced to the area of biological-material knowledge. When characterizing a cognitive object as ‘social,’ we would like to point out that, besides its existence within a net of socially constructed meanings, the subject of knowledge is part of the social practices through which the object reaches its consistency or ontological statute (Castorina, Clemente, Toscano and Lombardo, 2003). In turn, this subject is always a social actor (Psaltis, Duveen and Perret-Clermont, 2009; Psaltis, 2011) as his experiences are located within institutions where actions emerge and acquire meaning (Castorina, Clemente and Barreiro, 2003; Castorina, Kohen and Zerbino, 2000; Castorina, Zerbino, Kohen, Tabbush and Clemente, 2001).This is why we can affirm, synthetically, that ‘a social object coactions the subject, because it locates him in a specific institutional position, disciplines him or prescribes acts to be carried out by him’ (Lenzi and Castorina, 2000: p. 44, our translation).Thus, socially regulated interactions modulate the development of individual knowledge, orienting it towards a shared worldview, through the exchange with others, the instituted practices, and the semiotic resources available in different contextual levels (Valsiner, 2006; 2012; 2014; Winegar and Valsiner, 1992). To summarize, we can say that we consider the access to knowledge of a social object, such as death, neither a passive copy of the context’s meanings, nor an unlinked creation of historical and social meanings. Death is a type of object where multiple knowledge – such as physical, biological, logicalmathematical, and social knowledge – intersect and confluence (Rosengren, Gutiérrez and Schein, 2014). In that particular zone of relations, instituted senses, beliefs, practices, and opinions, as well as other forms of the group’s ideology are highly unstable and mutable. Contrarily to this, physical and biological knowledge show more fixity, and the norms regulating transformations in this domain are more substantial and consistent (Castorina, 1989) and consequently, more predictability, belonging to objects from practical experience. This makes ideas about death highly variable with regards to certain aspects even though, at the same time, notional nuclei referring to biology are the most stable and intersubjective ones. 196

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This said, we could anticipate that understanding death is not only to turn gradually intelligible the biological phenomenon of the cessation of vital functions, but also, to appropriate the set of practices, beliefs, and values of the social group. This ideological appropriation precedes or is relatively independent from the corresponding notional or conceptual development – as some analogous studies have shown (Lloyd and Duveen, 1990; Tajfel, 1981). In this process, an operation of delimitation – an objectification – takes place, through which we determine certain phenomena that occur in a social time, and that come to be a part of the corpus of the subject’s observable phenomena1 (Piaget, 1975; Tau and Lenzi, 2015). In the case of human death and dying, these observables are anticipated by practices and social representations regarding the body, the grievers, and their memories, but particularly, regarding time and social disposition. The organization of temporality (Ratcliff, 1995) is fundamental, not only for the comprehension of death – pertaining to the subject-of-knowledge’s point of view – but also for the definition of death as an object to be known – with regards to the researcher’s point of view on children’s ideas. More so, to understand the death of a person is to establish an organization of a sequence of events characterizing death and dying, but also to establish durations and proto-durations for the facts participating in those events. In other words, the comprehension of death presupposes the organization of temporal series of observable events for the subject. Now, if the phenomenon of human death is situated in time – that is, it supposes durations and sequences – and it involves situations and transformations the subject believes to constate in the facts: what is the time that death involves? What temporal extension does this object have? When does death occur? In spatial terms, where, in a series of transformations, can death be located? Is death identified to a constatation of being dead or does it start before this? Is it something with a beginning and an ending? Or is it more of an extensive process starting with life itself – or even before it – and then being prolonged indefinitely? Also, if death is a final instant towards which all life tends to, is it possible to distinguish death from dying? With regards to child knowledge regarding death, to the knowledge of which, of all of the events appearing in time with death, do we refer to? These questions are not only wonderings on time. On the contrary, they appear fundamental because their answers allow a definition of the set of transformations death refers to as an object to be known. As such, for religions, science, or common sense, death is something that happens and unfolds in time – something that, evidently, does not characterize every notion or concept the subject constructs. Nevertheless, ideas regarding death cannot be reduced to the characterization of being dead, to the attributes of the non-living, even though they entail the consideration of the changes in the body and the soul. Death turns mandatory some sort of comprehension of being alive – a knowledge that children show early on, when they deny, for example, that furniture can die – because death is always considered a status posterior in time to life – even in religious beliefs that accept re-editions or reincarnations. Thus, death demands the comprehension of a passage from or towards life. With regards to this timely dimension, death appears to consist in a transit or movement, rather than a state or fact. In this passage there is a moment before and a moment after death – eventually reversible – of certain events that succeed each other, independently of the reasons of occurrence stated by the subjects. Regarding the matter of time as inherent to the notion of death, we must address two issues. On the one hand, that of the duration of the phenomena related to death; on the other, their sequence or order. Time ‘is above most, necessary as duration, [. . .] it isn’t but the interval between the orders of succession’ (Piaget, 1972: p. 13). This said, it is necessary to determine what is the temporal extension of ‘that thing called death’ and its limits. The causes of death refer to a moment of variable duration that can commence in the beginning of time – as shown by myths and legends accounting for a destiny – or the birth of a 197

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person, or even in the production of an illness and culminate in the instant where the death of the body occurs.This last period is usually conceived as dying, that is, the process through which the systematic cessation of an organism’s life is reached. That same period of dying is defined as a constitutive part of the lifespan, in a frequent characterization from biology. In this case, death is a part of life, a gradual process leading to the collapse of an organic equilibrium. The duration of this period of dying – years, months, or the brief instants where a traumatic accident takes place – as well as its differentiation or undifferentiation with death itself, varies as a function of the subject’s knowledge and the domain of knowledge they refer to. For science, death occurs in a very different period than death for religion, and within these areas we can, in turn, find infinite divergences and mixtures. Secondly, besides the extension in time where dying and death as a cessation point are located, it is possible to find, in the individual and social representations about death, another posterior period. As such, the postmortem moment, referring to the after death or the ‘beyond’ is something which is present in religions and popular beliefs. Biology, in its way, is also concerned by the transformations taking place after death, referring to the physical principle of the conservation of energy through transformations. The discussions regarding whether the parts of the system are considered ‘alive’ account for this theoretical concern – such as, the conceptual and judiciary treatment of organ donation. Here, the extension is evidently variable and depends on the scales of observation, among other factors. Now, in a timeline, does death refer to both periods, that of dying and of the after death? Or is death the passage point between the two? In other terms, is it possible to locate a moment of occurrence of death, separated from dying as a potential death and from the beyond as death, which already happened? This actually appears to be a false problem. Neither in science, nor in religious or common sensible ideas, does knowledge regarding death refer to a hypothetical instant where death occurs, but to two moments succeeding each other and connected through a virtual passage point (Tau and Lenzi, 2016). From now on, we will refer, for one, to the moment of the reasons of occurrence of death (which we have called MRO), both in causal and proto-causal terms. It is a moment of variable duration where we can find all the arguments referring to what produces death. On the other hand, we will name the moment beyond death or postmortem, the after death or afterlife (MBD). In both moments, anterior and posterior to death as a passage or virtual point – point without duration, established in the encounter of both – it is possible to recognize a temporality of variable duration, as well as different directions in which time can move forward – i.e. time can be conceived as reversible or unidirectional (Tau and Lenzi, 2015). As such, ideas and knowledge about death are constructed simultaneously regarding these two moments: that of the reasons of occurrence and of the beyond death (MRO–MBD). In this access to knowledge regarding death, two systems of ideas of different origins intervene: the knowledge system of the body – strictly biological knowledge – and the system of values, beliefs, and cultural representations of the subject’s social group.To show the simultaneous participation of these two systems of ideas, we will refer, in what follows, to the children’s arguments used to ‘explain’ death and to certain ideas constructed of the afterlife. Finally, we will present some general conclusions about the modulation that is established between both systems of knowledge.

3  Children’s arguments to explain death When interrogated, children present arguments, which offer reasons – causal and proto-causal explanations regarding human death. These arguments are the expression of knowledge built by the subjects, with which they signify the different dimensions of death. As such, children ‘explain’ death, in a large sense, through references to one of the two moments mentioned: 2

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MRO or MBD.These arguments are not always deductions that are built from concepts, but rather simple relations and correspondences between knowledge of different nature that, as a function of the child’s logic, appear as general or particular premises of transductive judgments (Piaget, 1924; Tau and Lenzi, 2016). In turn, children’s explanations of death are the result of a double intervention: that of the context’s meanings and the instituted practices of the social group, as well as the biological and physical knowledge of each child. It is in this complex net of diverse knowledge that we must look for the child’s point of view on the matter. We can present the following ideas regarding the latter. 1 Knowledge about the body constitutes, gradually, a system integrated by morphological and functional observables showing a gradual development. This system barely intervenes in the first notions regarding death. As such, the first ideas children have about death refer to an attenuated life or a limited access for the living. Later, through knowledge about the human body, children gradually have access to a characterization of death as an interruption of the system’s homeostasis, thanks to the comprehension of partial functional alterations. This passage towards a progressive integration of biological knowledge in the comprehension of death starts with observations regarding movement and stillness, two fundamental traits of early characterizations of life and death, respectively. Thus, knowledge about death develops, partly, through the intervention of biological knowledge; although, as we have stated, knowledge about human death cannot be reduced to the development of naïve biology. Is it possible to affirm, at least, that it is this domain that tractions the development of knowledge, by creating new observables and, with them, new sources of cognitive disequilibrium and re-equilibration? If we admit that contradictions do not produce disequilibriums, but that the latter lead to logical contradictions, we consider that the equilibration theory (Piaget, 1975) anticipates the possibility of a multiple rationality, as constated in numerous cases. The motor for development is the insufficient coordinations between observables. These admit an incipient coordination from the moment when they refer to a same object and start to be mutually implicated. The incomplete coordinations between observables lead to disequilibriums and, finally, to constructive regulations. But this general mechanism admits in its own definition the idea of a multiple rationality, given that it is not the principle of non-contradiction or the search for coherence that moves the development of knowledge. On the contrary, a subject’s knowledge can be profoundly incoherent  –  for an external observer, and for the subject himself!  –  without it leading to any attempts of eliminating the contradiction. Only the disequilibriums of incipient coordinations will constitute a true factor for cognitive construction (Piaget, 1975; 1977). The consequences of this thesis are relevant for the comprehension of the development of social knowledge in general, and death in particular. As such, daily practices and shared representations are not another ‘factor’ in development, next to the internal equilibration of the cognitive structures, but a part of a general process of constructive equilibration. In our case the knowledge from the biological domain, as well as social representations and shared meanings about death, configure the horizon of observable nurturing3 the process of coordination and construction of new observables. Thus, the profound logical contradictions of the subjects are only found in the orbit of a regulatory process tending to suppress them. Such dominance could only occur in those cases where beliefs refer to different observables amongst which, for a specific activity or by reference to a common object, an incipient coordination is established (Piaget, 1975).This is much more evident in adults that assert simultaneously contradictory knowledge regarding death. 199

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Now, biological knowledge is gradually systematized and presents a stability and coherence that give the comprehension of death its developmental characteristic trait. In this line most of the studies regarding the child’s comprehension of death have been developed, overlooking other issues not offering coherence or regularity in development. Religious beliefs, for instance, do not present the progression or the systematization proper of knowledge regarding the body, but intervene all the same in the production of knowledge of death and dying. 2

3

4

The context’s social representations – particularly, religious beliefs – do not offer a genetic development and cannot be reduced to beliefs about biology either. Images, representations, and narratives from religion – in our study, from Christianity – are found in the children’s arguments and presented for the child as a series of symbols and semiotic relations anticipated, prêt-à-porter, based on which children think about death. There is nothing to indicate that these beliefs are less efficient hypotheses in the production of individual knowledge. Religious beliefs are not shown as weaker knowledge for the fact that they do not appear to have a progressive and systematic development, from lower to higher levels of knowledge, such as the observed in the biological domain. Piaget (1950) showed that ‘a knowledge susceptible of being immediately replaced by another is, without a doubt, a poor knowledge’ (p. 265, our translation). Precisely, what we observe in children is that they do not give up beliefs on heaven, the souls, and the reencounter with the dead, and other religious assertions, while building knowledge regarding the body. Contrarily to this, religious beliefs are progressively differentiated from biological knowledge, until reaching a differentiated ontology—as we will show here, with regards to the space and the entities. The split of entities – mostly body and soul – as well as the spaces proper to the dead – heaven and earth, among others – suppose a series of attributes that come, undoubtedly, from religion and biological knowledge respectively. Thus, we can affirm that two belief systems intervene simultaneously in the production of knowledge regarding death. As we mentioned, our results indicate that both religion and biology ‘modulate,’ without preeminence of one or the other, knowledge about death. In any case, if a preeminence is found, it seems to be due to the charge the values imposed by the family group have on each of these sources. The case of atheist children denying religious imaginary and, thus, heaven and souls, shows us that parental beliefs and values mark the unequal participation of certain representations and not others. Contrarily to what is stated in some Neo-piagetian studies on the topic, we can affirm that it is not the decontextualized equilibratory dynamic that explains the acquisition of knowledge regarding death, but rather the search for equilibriums between observables constructed by the subject in a specific culture and with the semiotic resources and values it provides. The role, and especially the inculcation4, of children’s belief systems about death does not contradict the thesis situating the origin of knowledge in the social interaction of subjects. In other words, the role of inculcation does not entail to conceive the subject as a passive recipient, subjected to the context. Knowledge is not a copy or repetition of adults’ beliefs. For example, Mary, a 10-year-old girl, had been denied by her parents an explanation of death and, nevertheless, she was one of the girls from our sample showing more diversity and original ideas and theories in the interview. Besides showing the obvious fact – that productivity cannot be impeded by the mere will of parents deciding there are things in the world a girl cannot think about – we are especially interested in the fact that the construction of knowledge is not accelerated or delayed by low thematization from the immediate context, but by the subjects’ experience. Contingent opportunities to temathize and objectificate the phenomenon of death are much more determining with regards to 200

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the acquisitions and children’s hypothesis, than the beliefs of the family group. In turn, while not finding a direct association between the beliefs of religious families and the notion the child has regarding the MB – for example, the existence of heaven – we noted a participation of religious representations: i) through extremely subtle ways of cultural communication, narratives, representations, and social practices; ii) they constitute one of the largest ‘nutrients’ for child thought, offering imagined and narrative solutions to the specific problems the subjects reflect upon in development. Having presented the former general points, we will now refer to some of the effects of interference between the two knowledge systems mentioned, in child thought.

4  What dies with death and what is the space where it occurs? Children of all ages from our sample show a fundamental discrimination in the universe of objects that die. On this basis, and through arguments which are more or less sophisticated in each age group, they distinguish two basic orders: that of the living, which can die, and that of the inanimate objects, which cannot die. This does not mean that death and life are initially contrary terms. As such, being dead is not so clearly separated from being alive for 5-year-old children. For example, a person is dead if we simply ‘do not see them any more.’ This characterization is centered in the same point of view as the child’s, rather than in the relations and attributes of the world. In the other extreme of our subsample, children closer to 10 years of age do not characterize death as non-life either. The specific properties of the dead and the living, registered at this level, utterly exceed the possibility for establishing a term-to-term inversion. This happens when children’s biological knowledge allows them to relativize the idea of death as an absolute extinction of life and starts being conceived as a rupture of certain equilibriums which continue in new forms of life and energy transformation. Thus, references to death as an inversion or as symmetric to life appear only possible in the intermediary levels of our age group. In turn, within the field of living beings, where death occurs, children establish differentiations concerning who, when, and why someone dies. Here, we will present the children’s beliefs found with regards to the type of human entity which dies or that can die: the ‘person,’ ‘body,’ or some other immaterial entity associated with it, such as the ‘soul.’ For this, we avoid the denomination of component, constituent, or any other supposing a hierarchy part-whole of what is human. In fact, we do not find a hierarchy of the entities in our children’s answers and, even though it appears to be implied in some of the arguments, it does not always presuppose a strict class logic.The soul, for example, can be a term through which the child designates the ‘whole’ person. More so, in children denying the existence of the soul but accepting the immateriality of thought coexisting with a body, nothing leads us to believe those two entities are ‘parts’ of a whole. It is even more difficult to distinguish possible hierarchies related to ambiguous categories such as ‘person,’ which children use without much precision to designate the dead body, what ascended to heaven or both things simultaneously. This is why we prefer the term ‘entity’ only indicating a reality or an observable capable of withstanding a predication, without hierarchical reminiscences. The interviewed children recognize three categories of entities or aspects of what is human, non-hierarchically, to refer to what dies: the person, the body, and the soul. Each of these entities adopts different denominations which we synthesize in the following table. Children think that death occurs in some of these categories – person, body, or soul – in several, or all of them. Thus, for example, they admit that what dies is the body and not the 201

Ramiro Tau Table 16.1 Types of entities that die, according to children.

Properties of the entity

Equivalent denominations (with emphases in different observables, conserving the same properties)

Person

Body

Soul

–‘wildcard’ entity that adopts different meanings depending on the main aspect considered (substantial or insubstantial) –in general, it does not imply soul-body splitting –if it means splitting, ‘person’ can refer to any of the other entities, alternately or simultaneously –man/woman –boy/girl –elder/oldster –guy/gal

–substantial somatic entity, tangible and localized –regulated by physical and biological ‘laws’ –it could or could not be associated with an insubstantial entity such as the soul

–insubstantial entity associated to the body –only after death is it possible to separate from the body and autonomize –it is not governed by the physical-biological ‘laws’

–skeleton –corpse –bones –skin –flesh –person

–spirit –ghost –angel –thoughts –memories –person

soul, or both. Some subjects believe that death happens gradually or with nuances and not in an absolute manner, which is affirmed when they state that, after dying, some of the living’s capacities are lost while others remain. These variable nuances of subsistences are distributed in a particular way amongst the entities. Such is the case of children attributing to the dead body an absolute motor incapacity, which in the death spirit is not lost or partially limited, since in heaven it can walk, run, or play. Finally, regarding time, death unequally affects entities, generating décalages between multiple instants of occurrence. In these situations, some of the entities die before others, as explained by children believing that after earthly death, the soul can die one or more times in heaven, while not the body, dying only once. Synthetically, when children think about human death, they do not always do so regarding all of its aspects, regarding a unique undividable entity. For some subjects, death affects partially and unequally each of the differentiated entities. For children, for whom death is something that happens to a ‘person’ – without distinction from other entities – there are no deaths which are décalé. The child from this group conceives only one death which happened to a unique entity. A different group of children – all over 7 years of age – asserts that it is only the body which dies or ‘the shell’ of a person, but not the entity associated with it – soul, spirit, angel, or memories – in contrast with the undifferentiation shown by the subjects mentioned above. This belief implies a splitting of body-soul that entails that death does not affect equally each one of the distinguished entities. As such, for these children, it is possible for the somatic entity to die and the soul to remain alive after the death of the body, thus, split the occurrence of death. Finally, certain children accept that there can be 202

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death of the body and the associated entity they recognize, at different times, but death can only be repeated under the following condition. While they deny the possibility of multiple deaths for the body or the somatic entity, they accept it for the unsubstantial entity. This is the case of Frederic, 7 years old, who affirms that the dead spirit can die again while being in heaven, reediting the ascension to a second heaven, higher than the previous one. Regarding the body in the tomb, in turn, he affirms that it cannot die again, because it is already buried. In both cases, the justifications of these beliefs are usually completely ad hoc, indicating that the true cognitive fundament is inaccessible to the child’s conscience and demands an explanatory hypothesis that manages to include the span of answers. A privileged path to study the specificity of these entities and the reasons leading a child to admit a definitive death or the possibility of a death after death, is the detailed analysis of the beliefs in the subsistence of the capacities of each recognized entity. In general terms, we have called ‘subsistence of capacities’ to child beliefs regarding the postmortem conservation – in the MBD – of certain physical or mental capacities. We must point out that in these cases, the capacity the child believes is conserved in the dead person is one of the specific traits of being dead and not an indication of life. The distinction between physical and mental capacities is, partly, arbitrary and we will follow here the common sensible criteria used by children: for them, the physical capacities are motor and perceptive, while mental capacities are experiences of internal representation – thoughts, memories, ideas, dreams, feelings – which, unlike perceptions, do not entail a real time adjustment to an external object. As we mentioned, the subsistence of capacities is revealing of the child’s thinking, taking us to a different interpretative level, attainable if considering exclusively the dying entity. More so, after death, the subsisting characteristics are redistributed unequally, between the three types of entities mentioned. Each of them can retain a certain capacity and lose others, depending on a specific logic which does not respond to chance and that we will try to schematize. In general terms, children of all ages accept the subsistence of physical or mental capacities in the soul or in any other entity. As such, they attribute all kinds of exceptions to knowledge regarding the body: transparencies, flotations, guessing, impossibilities to get sick or get hit, among other violations of physical-biological laws of child experience. Contrarily, on the other extreme, children think of the dead person’s body without the transgressions found in the soul. What happens is in strict agreement with knowledge from the physical-biological domain of daily experience. The dead body disintegrates, dismembers, or rots, the bodily and mental functions cease their functioning, and there are no transparencies, flotations, or reiterations. In turn, the body is the support of all of the observables that function as discrimination criteria and death judgment for children, from immobility until the more sophisticated organic functioning. Thus, subjects deny the dead body any type of physical or mental subsistence – with the exception of the microscopic activity, taking place in the cadaver, for children of 9 and 10 years old, confirming the empire of the biologic legality. Last, regarding the ‘person,’ given that it is a term which for the child can alternatively adopt the meaning of body, soul, or both, it can keep or lose all kinds of physical or mental capacities after they died. We found here an aspect we consider highly interesting to understand the child ontology. The difference between a ‘person’ conserving and another that loses capacities in the MBD depends almost exclusively on another fundamental condition: its localization. If the person dies and is located in a tomb, cemetery, hospital, or bed, amongst other alternatives, the postmortem properties extinguish, just as with the entity of the ‘body.’ Contrarily to this, if the dead person goes to heaven, the clouds, a star, or any other space far away from daily accessible experience, some physical properties may be conserved. We thus observe the particular way to understand death, regulated both by the type of entity considered and the space where such an entity is located. 203

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The locus or postmortem space allows us to define a topology for children regarding death. Each of these loci anticipate what is possible and impossible. In order to reduce and systematize the multiple spatial references of children’s arguments regarding the destiny of the dead, we refer, generically, to the terms mostly employed by our children: heaven and earth. They both account for two types of spatialities for the dead and the subjects use diverse equivalent terms regarding their central aspects.The references to both spaces are found in children of all ages in our sample, belonging to all religious, atheist, and agnostic families equally. As such, we consider the term heaven as the representative of all children’s ideas regarding an astronomic and imaginary space with a superior location with regards to the space occupied by living people, towards which one can look and where the dead person or some part of the dead person lives, because it was carried or lifted there somehow. Even though heaven is the term most employed by children, they also refer to it as ‘paradise,’ ‘clouds,’ ‘stars,’ or the ‘reign of God,’ which for our analysis have the same value, due to the fact that they all refer to inaccessible spaces, with equivalent legal properties. A specular variant of heaven is hell: a low place, subterraneous, towards which people, souls, or other entities go after death. It is usually associated with evil, punishment, or what is low, painful, or ugly. Essentially, it presents characteristics homologous to heaven – especially regarding the transgression of biological laws – even though inverse to it in position, values, and affective marks. Finally, we regroup under the term earth notions such as ‘ground,’ ‘tomb,’ ‘cemetery,’ ‘box,’ ‘coffin,’ and others, referring always to an earthly space potentially accessible by the living. Some locations named by children, such as a hospital, an ambulance, or the floor of a house, share with earth a spatial location, the accessibility for the living and the empire of physical-biological principles, which they know. Heaven and earth are opposed, as such, by a vertical topology top-down and by a horizontal distance accessible-inaccessible for the living, but much more precisely by the empire of ‘laws’ or different principles in each space. While on earth, the possible and the necessary are circumscribed to the limits imposed by physical-biological knowledge, heaven is relieved of these legal exigencies and belongs to a ‘magical’ territory where time, physical constants, and biological norms lose jurisdiction (see Figure 16.1). This postmortem topology, which children organize around the poles of heaven and earth, recreates spatially, the two belief systems majoritarily intervening in the production of ideas and

up

+ persistence + distance - body

Heaven

Earth

inaccessible

accessible

Hell - persistence - distance + body

down

Figure 16.1  Postmortem topologies.

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representations regarding death: the system of biological knowledge about the body and religious beliefs – in a large sense. To each locus corresponds a legality originated in these systems, which is ‘projected’ on the world, acquiring an ontological status. As such, spaces occupied by the dead are an effect and real counterpart of dying.

5  Towards a multiple rationality: death as a polyphasic zone As we have pointed out so far, child thinking about death is not limited to an inquiry on biological functioning. To understand death is, descriptively, to establish a set of reasons for its occurrence and to thematize the after – spatially, the beyond. Beliefs about the entities which die and the places towards which the dead go – a prolongation of the primitive reduction of concepts in spatial terms – are also a part of knowledge about death and dying, as shown by the study of children’s ideas. The comprehension of human death supposes the double challenge of recognizing the body and its limitations, but also to signify the beyond of existence, and the after of fundamental alterations in regular exchanges with the living. In this signification process, the true cognitive challenge is to render this disruption intelligible. For this, children construct ideas that belong to multiple fields of knowledge. The context’s social representations, values, and images offered by the culture constitute an evidently symbolic material. At the same time, each child’s ideas are original and show us that knowledge is not a passive copy of the social group’s meanings. In this process, biological knowledge is integrated and differentiated, always modulated by other belief systems. This modulation is not a deviation of biological knowledge – considered by many authors the true nucleus of children’s comprehension of death. More so, ideology and social representations coexist with biological knowledge, and not only during childhood. Adults continue to refer reasons that account for a multiple rationality. Thus, in social contexts where religious beliefs constitute a central aspect of the adult’s ‘epistemic frame’ (Piaget and García, 1982), knowledge about the body and medical practices corresponding to it are not minimized, but coexist. For the subject convinced of the divine participation in worldly facts, and belonging to a context with religious practices strongly instituted, the role of traumatisms, diseases or the life span, is rendered invisible (Albarghouthi, 2012;Wagner et al., 2000). In the case of our children, these same unstable correspondences between biological observables and motivations of other orders are typical. Following the prior considerations is that we state that knowledge regarding death does not constitute a typical form for conceptualization.To understand death is to know a zone of objects belonging to different belief systems. In turn, these objects and legalities regulating them always reach an always partial and unstable equilibrium, which cannot be eliminated. With this, such a zone is profoundly polyphasic and its knowledge can in no way be described as a regular process towards more objectivity. Key words: cognitive development, children, death, afterlife, naïve biology, argumentation

Notes 1 The Piagetian notion of ‘observable’ is not confused with ‘perceptible.’ An observable, even if it implies a sensory register, is the empirical verification of knowledge of the subject, guided by his schemes of action. In other words, it is what the subject believes to constate in the facts (Piaget, 1974; 1975; Piaget and García, 1982). 2 We used a verbal clinical-critical interview (Delval, 2001), with a graphic phase (Tau, 2016). 3 We would like to indicate with this that these practices and social representations are not mere external vectors, but the matter itself with which equilibration operates.

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Ramiro Tau 4 We use the term inculcation in the sense given by Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) that refers to an action of imposition of arbitrary norms and criteria, produced within an institutional space, familiar or scholar, performed by agents endowed authority.

Further reading Bering, J. M. and Bjorklund, D. F. (2004) ‘The Natural Emergence of Reasoning About the Afterlife as a Developmental Regularity,’ Developmental Psychology, 40, pp. 217–233. Harris, P. L. and Schleifer, M. (2011) Children’s Understanding of Death: From Biological to Religious Conceptions. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kastenbaum, R. (2000) The Psychology of Death. New York: Springer Publishing. Rosengren, K. S., Miller, P. J., Gutiérrez, I. T., Chow, P. I., Schein, S. S., Anderson, K. N. and Callanan, M. A. (2014) Children’s Understanding of Death:Toward a Contextualized and Integrated Account. Boston: Wiley. Slaughter,V. and Griffiths, M. (2007) ‘Death Understanding and Fear of Death in Young Children,’ Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 12(4), pp. 525–535.

Bibliography Albarghouthi, S. I. Z. (2012) The Palestinians Understanding of Cancer: A Methodological Perspective. The 14th Conference on Social and Community Psychology. Trondheim: Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) Barry,V. E. (2007) Philosophical Thinking About Death and Dying. Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth. Baudrillard, J. (1980) El intercambio simbólico y la muerte. Caracas: Monte Avila. Berger, P. L., Luckmann,T. and Zuleta, S. (1968) La construcción social de la realidad. Buenos Aires: Amorrortu. Bourdieu, P. and Passeron, J. C. (1977) Reproduction in society, education and culture. Translated by David Corson (1990). Language policy across the curriculum. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Carpio, A. P. (1997) Principios de filosofía. Introducción a su problemática. Buenos Aires: Glauco. Castorina, J. A. (1989) ‘Los problemas en Psicologia Genetica: una introducción epistemológica,’ en: Castorina, J. A., Aisenber, B., Dibar Ure, C., Colinvaux, D. and Palau, G. (eds). Problemas en Psicología Genética. Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila, pp. 11–33. Castorina, J. A. (2005) ‘La investigación psicológica de los conocimientos sociales. Los desafíos a la tradición constructivista,’ in: Castorina, J. A. (Coord.). Construcción conceptual y representaciones sociales. El conocimiento de la sociedad. Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila, pp. 19–44. Castorina, J. A., Clemente, F. and Barreiro, A. (2003) ‘El conocimiento de los niños sobre la sociedad según el constructivismo y la teoría de las representaciones sociales,’ en: Investigaciones en Psicología, Revista del Instituto de Investigaciones de la Facultad de Psicología, UBA, 8(3), pp. 25–48. Castorina, J. A., Clemente, F., Toscano, A. and Lombardo, E. (2003) ‘El programa constructivista ante las representaciones colectivas y sociales,’ X Anuario de Investigación en Psicología, 10, pp. 71–80. Castorina, J. A., Kohen, R. C. and Zerbino, M. C. (2000). ‘Reflexiones sobre la ‘especificidad’ de un subdominio del conocimiento social,’ en: Castorina, J.A. and Lenzi,A. M. (comp.). La formación de los conocimientos sociales en los niños. Investigaciones psicológicas y perspectivas educativas. Barcelona: Gedisa, pp. 135–154. Castorina, J. A., Zerbino, M., Kohen, R.,Tabbush, C. and Clemente, F. (2001) ‘El conocimiento social de los niños y las prácticas institucionales,’ Revista IRICE, 15, pp. 31–54. Delval, J. (1997) ‘La representación infantil del mundo social,’ en:Turiel, E., Enesco, I. and Linaza, J. (comps.). El mundo social en la mente infantil. Madrid: Alianza, pp. 245–330). Delval, J. (2001) Descubrir el pensamiento de los niños. Introducción a la práctica del método clínico. Barcelona: Paidós. Delval, J. (2007) ‘Aspectos de la construcción del conocimiento sobre la sociedad,’ Educar, 30, pp. 45–64. Ferrater Mora, J. (1965) Diccionario de Filosofía. 5th Edition. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana. Jaspers, K. (1950) La Filosofía. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Lenzi, A. M. and Castorina, J. A. (2000) ‘El cambio conceptual en conocimientos políticos. Aproximación a un modelo explicativo,’ en: Castorina J. A. and Lenzi, A. M. (comp.). La formación de los conocimientos sociales en los niños. Investigaciones psicológicas y perspectivas educativas. Barcelona: Gedisa, pp. 201–224. Lloyd, B. and Duveen, G. (1990) ‘A Semiotic Analysis of the Development of Social Representations of Gender,’ in: Duveen, G. and Lloyd, B. (eds). Social Representations and the Development of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 27–46.

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17 THE EFFECTS OF PARENTAL DEATH ON RELIGIOSITY WITHIN AN AMERICAN CONTEXT Renae Wilkinson 1  Introduction: why I study parental death and religion The main objective of my research is to understand the relationship between personal crisis and religion. This allows us to see the subtle dimensions of each in greater clarity. First, I believe that examining religion and crisis can teach us about adversity. People unveil something authentic about themselves in extreme moments, and these times can reveal the best and worst parts of the human condition. Second, studying religion and crisis can also give deeper insight into lived religion. Religion often is viewed abstractly as a system of beliefs, rituals, and symbols that can operate beyond the particulars of a situation or an individual’s life. In stressful times, religion can shift from the abstract to concrete. These moments may provide some of the clearest windows into religious experience (Pargament, 2001). Finally, exploring the relationship between religion and crisis teaches us about resilience. Hardship and suffering are critical moments when established methods for dealing with problems may be destabilized and new solutions are required. Religion is uniquely positioned to speak to these experiences of adversity.These are times when faith may be sought or tested.

2  Limitations and advantages of an American sociological approach Data analysis Like many in the field of quantitative sociology, my research involves the use of secondary data analysis of mostly large, national and international, cross-sectional and longitudinal datasets. American sociology is increasingly emphasizing studies that utilize quantitative methodologies, a trend that Pitirim Sorokin (1961) identified more than half a century ago and labeled ‘quantophrenia,’ and my training is a result of this movement. Although there is no dearth of large datasets ready and available for analysis, resources for studying a topic such as parental death quantitatively in meaningful ways are limited. While few surveys even include items asking respondents whether and when they experienced the death of a parent, perhaps the most significant disadvantage of studying parental death using secondary data analysis is the absence of survey questions probing bereaved children about their appraisal of these deaths.This absence is likely why most studies of parental death and religiosity take a qualitative approach, often 208

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utilizing in-depth interviews with smaller samples of individuals. A qualitative methodology enables interviewers to ask questions that encourage respondents to describe their experience with parental death and its effects in ways that survey questions cannot. Interviewers can tailor responses to subjects’ answers to tease out whether relationships between parental death and changes in religiosity are causal. However, a distinct advantage of utilizing large datasets for secondary analysis is the generalizability of results. Given that parental death is a common human experience, it is helpful to understand the shared effects of losing a parent. A quantitative approach is useful for identifying the larger patterns that exist in responses to parental death for outcomes of religiosity, allowing eventually for the generation of empirically grounded theories.

Context Studying parental death and religion in America provides a unique opportunity to examine this relationship because the United States is exceptionally religious compared to other modernized nations (Davie, 2013). According to the 2014 Pew Research Center Religious Landscape Study, Americans are predominantly Christian (71%), express absolute certainty in the existence of God (63%), and are highly religiously active (36% report attending religious services at least weekly and 55% pray at least daily). Because religion is a common orienting framework on which Americans may draw to cope in times of hardship, we can reasonably expect the associations between parental death and religious beliefs and behaviors to be significant for many bereaved men and women in the United States. Examining the dynamics of these associations within the American context provides researchers and laypersons a window into the general dynamics present between religion and loss. Research on religion within the American context, however, is limited by how religion is operationalized by sociologists (Smith et al., 2013). Because the majority of Americans identify as Christian, many sociological studies of religion neglect religions other than Christianity. Additionally, the American measure of religiosity operationalized as regular participation in a voluntary association such as a church service obfuscates other formal and informal measures that may indicate high levels of religious participation in different religious traditions. That said, for the purposes of this review, which is openly set in an American context, I will briefly overview a few of the conventional measures utilized in a quantitative sociological operationalization of religion in the United States. I will not, however, itemize the legitimate ways in which these measures may be insufficient (for this, see Bender, 2012). As mentioned previously, a common indicator of religiosity utilized in sociological studies of religion is religious service attendance. Religious service attendance is a public, institutional measure of religious behavior. Prayer is another measure of religious behavior, but is considered more of a private, personal indicator. Religious tradition affiliation is a measure of religious belonging, indicating whether respondents affiliate themselves with a specific denomination (respondents who report ‘no affiliation’ are labeled religious ‘nones’), and these denominations are often grouped into broader traditions (e.g. Evangelical Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, etc.). Indicators of subjective religiosity, on the other hand, include how religious/spiritual respondents report to be, as well as how important their religious faith or spirituality is to them (salience), and how often they turn to their religious beliefs to help them with their problems.

3  Understanding the association between parental death and religion When faced with a crisis, many Americans turn to faith as a source of help, while others turn away from religion. The ‘religious coping’ literature situates its discussion of how individuals 209

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respond to stressful life events as times of reappraisal during which questions of meaning are raised (Zinnbauer, et al, 1997). It is in these extreme moments that religion – which, as Geertz (1966: p. 19) states, deals directly with ‘how to suffer, how to make of physical pain, personal loss, worldly defeat, or the helpless contemplation of others’ agony something bearable, supportable – something, as we say, sufferable’ – is uniquely qualified to provide guidance for coping with crises. In these pivotal life moments, two patterns of religious coping emerge. Positive religious coping involves engaging religion in times of difficulty; it is associated with positive attributions of religious forgiveness, seeking spiritual support, collaborative religious coping, spiritual connection, religious purification, and benevolent religious reappraisal (Pargament et al., 1998). Conversely, negative religious coping is expressed through negative attributions: spiritual discontent, viewing God as ‘punishing,’ or disengaging from religious involvement. Individuals more frequently draw on positive methods of religious coping following stressful life events than negative methods (Pargament et al., 1998). Religion as a coping resource is commonly invoked in response to bereavement, and it is widely assumed to be helpful. The bereaved likely turn to faith in the face of loss to seek comfort, coping resources, and meaning frameworks that religion can provide (Pargament, Koenig and Perez, 2000). Although some bereaved do not consider religion helpful (Cait, 2004; Gilbert, 1992; Davis and Nolen-Hoeksema, 2001; Robbins, 1990), other studies show that many bereaved individuals believe that faith is beneficial for their postloss adjustment (Balk, 1983; DeFrain, Millspaugh and Xie, 1996; Smith, 2002). Park’s meaning-making coping model seeks to explain how and why a positive or negative appraisal of a loss or trauma influences individuals. This model identifies two levels of meaning: systems of global meaning and the appraised meaning of situational events (Park, 2005). Global meaning consists of the cognitive guiding structures of beliefs and goals that individuals construct about the nature of the world. Appraised meaning of events involves the interpretation of events as traumatic or threatening, and the initial causal attribution explaining why the event occurred. Individuals also appraise how an event aligns with or diverges from one’s global meaning system, and what should be done to cope with the event. The model proposes that the level of distress an event such as the death of one’s parent causes is determined by the extent of the discrepancy between the individual’s appraisal of the meaning of the event and their global meaning system. Individuals attempt to reduce the state of uncertainty and incomprehensibility that results from large discrepancies between appraised and global meaning by changing the appraised meaning of the situation, changing their global beliefs and goals, or changing both.

4  Prior American studies of parental death and religiosity Bereavement can lead to increased religion and spirituality (when the bereaved find comfort from faith), or it may affect decreased religion and spirituality (when the bereaved question the validity of their faith). The relationship between religion and parent loss is inconsistent. In an older study, Loveland (1968) showed that bereaved adults felt more religious and prayed more after their bereavement than before. This study does not, however, focus exclusively on the effects of parental death – it includes bereaved parents and spouses in addition to bereaved children. Another study examined the effects of resources for coping with the death of an elderly parent. Scharlach and Fuller-Thomson (1994) found that adults aged 35 to 60 were more likely to find all other resources (i.e. friends, peers, family, spouses, and work) more helpful for dealing with mother or father loss than religion. Subsequently, daughters were more likely than sons to report receiving help from religion in dealing with a mother’s death. Finally, Calhoun and Tedeschi (1990) interviewed fifty-two adults between the ages of 30 and 90 about their experience 210

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with grieving the death of a loved one (including, but not limited to, a parent) and found that most respondents reported that the death had strengthened their religious beliefs. Several other studies explicitly examined the association between parental death and the faith of bereaved children. In one study conducted by Smith (2002) of thirty (predominantly religious) African American, middle-aged women who experienced mother loss, 97% of bereaved daughters said that their religious beliefs were helpful to them during their mother’s death and dying. One woman explained: ‘[Mother’s death] was God’s will. So who am I to say, ‘Hey, God, You shouldn’t have taken my mother.’ That’s being selfish. Remember, God gave his only begotten son’ (Smith, 2002: p. 319). Another woman in the study described: ‘I feel the Lord just came down and carried her [mother] to heaven. I said, ‘I’m okay because I know where my mother is. And that’s in heaven. She’s okay. She ain’t suffering. She’s in the Lord’s arms.’ (Smith, 2002: p. 317). The majority of women in the sample (twenty-seven out of thirty) stated that they accepted their mother’s death with God’s help.The accounts in this study all exemplify how a religious/spiritual meaning system can provide comfort or reassurance to bereaved children following parental death. Religious attribution in the context of parental death does not always provide relief to bereaved children. In a study conducted by Davis and Nolen-Hoeksema (2001) of 205 participants, 44% of whom experienced parent loss, a common source of comfort following the death of a family member was religious or spiritual (afterlife) beliefs. However, one woman described how experiencing the death of her mother from a terminal illness caused her to struggle with ‘why she suffered as she did, and why she had to experience death in a very slow, painful way’ because her mother ‘spiritually had a God that she believed in very strongly, lived her life according to what she felt were good religious beliefs, was known as everybody’s angel, always there for people’ (Davis and Nolen-Hoeksema, 2001: p. 731). Similarly, a study of ten white, middle-aged women who had lost their mothers (eight of whom lost both parents) found that experiencing mother loss led some women to question their faith or doubt God’s existence. One woman described the experience of losing her mother: I didn’t know anymore if God existed. I mean a lot of this stuff was already happening, but my mother’s death . . . I just didn’t know any more who God was, if God was, or what God was. . . . I think that who God is for me comes through my mother . . . God is faithful. . . . My mother was faithful to me all my life. . . . Losing her meant losing that person in my life. Robbins, 1990: p. 50 The association between religion and parental death can be complex and may develop as time passes. For one woman, mourning her mother involved a process of moving from believing that ‘God is a punishing God’ to ‘coming to know a presence within. God as a loving friend . . . it’s still very tenuous. It’s kind of a rebirth’ (Robbins, 1990: p. 51). For another young adult woman whose mother died suddenly, her initial feelings of betrayal and that ‘God had made a mistake’ eventually transitioned into a growing spirituality (Angell, Dennis and Dumain, 1998: p. 623). Similarly, in a study conducted with eighteen women who were parentally bereaved during adolescence, most experienced a struggle with their faith following the death of a mother or father characterized as an oscillation between feelings of anger at God for letting the parent die and a comfort derived from religion/spirituality (Cait, 2004). Of the women who detached themselves from religion and belief in God after experiencing parental death, one described: When my dad died, I stopped going to church. It was like if I do believe in God, he took away my father. . . . Now I guess instead of not believing in God, I don’t really 211

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know if God exists. And just in the last semester, I realized that this [religion] is really important to me and why have I ignored it for so long. I think that I kind of stopped being religious to sort of disassociate myself from him [her father] and I kind of feel that is how I am going to be close with him again. Cait, 2004: p. 172 Of the two women whose religious beliefs were strengthened, one said of her father’s death: I guess because of my faith in God and religion at the time, I saw his death as a good thing because he was so sick and suffering so much that he was finally relieved of all that. I used to have dreams of my father coming to me. I always saw that as his spirit coming to me in hard times. Cait, 2004: p. 173 One woman in the sample reported that her belief in God remained the same, and several others were never religious before or after the death, one of whom reported: ‘I never believed in God and all that stuff. . . . It didn’t mean anything to me. It didn’t then and doesn’t now’ (Cait, 2004: p. 175). The inconsistent associations between parental death and religiosity is also shown in a study conducted by Schwartzberg and Janoff-Bulman (1991), who performed semi-structured clinical interviews with twenty-one undergraduates who had recently lost a parent to examine the effects of the death on their assumptions about themselves and their worlds. In these interviews, approximately 50% of participants reported changes in their religious beliefs as an effect of parental death. Among those reporting religious change, 40% said the loss made them less religious, while the remaining 60% described becoming more religious. Overall, these qualitative studies demonstrate that experiences such as the death of one’s parent affect a change in religiosity for some, but not all, bereaved children. This research also shows that the direction of these religious changes is inconsistent, with deaths affecting new or strengthened religiosity in some, and lost or decreased religiosity in others. While these studies benefit from the ability to draw a direct connection between event and outcome through interviews, this methodological approach usually necessitates small sample sizes resulting in ungeneralizable results. These studies show that there are interesting dynamics within the relationship between parental death and religiosity that have yet to be fully explored. Specifically, parental death and its associations with religion may vary depending upon the age at which one experiences the parental loss (Harris, 1991; Schafer, 2009). Additionally, gender of the deceased parent and the bereaved child may affect the impact on the religiosity of the bereaved (Lenhardt and McCourt, 2000; Marks, Jun and Song, 2007; Scharlach and Fuller-Thomson, 1994).

5  The present study: a life-course perspective on parental death and religion The data The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) is a large, nationally representative longitudinal dataset funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and seventeen other federal agencies (Harris et al., 2009). Add Health is designed to examine adolescent health and health-related behaviors in the United States and their causes. This dataset also includes a number of survey items on religious 212

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beliefs and behaviors. The first wave of the data (Wave 1) was administered to 20,745 American youth in grades 7–12 in 1995 and 1996. Wave 4 was conducted in 2007 and 2008 when participants were young adults, aged between 24 and 34 years old. This fourth wave consisted of interviews with 15,701 of the original Wave 1 respondents. Advantages of using Add Health for secondary data analysis are its ability to provide insight into the effects of parental death on young adult religiosity with strong statistical power due to the size of the sample, and its ability to explore changes in religiosity between survey waves because of the longitudinal nature of the data. In order to examine the effect of parental death on religion beyond young adulthood, a second longitudinal dataset can be employed: The National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS). MIDUS is conducted by the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Midlife Development ‘to investigate the role of behavioral, psychological, and social factors in accounting for age-related variations in health and well-being in a national sample of Americans’ (Midlife in the United States, 2011). Like Add Health, MIDUS includes survey items asking men and women about their religious beliefs and behaviors. The first wave was administered in 1995 and 1996 to 7,108 adults aged 25 to 74, and the second wave of interviews was conducted with 3,487 of the original MIDUS participants in 2004 through 2006 when respondents were aged 35 to 86. Analyses are restricted to respondents included in the main RDD sample. MIDUS is a complementary longitudinal dataset conducted at approximately the same periods as Add Health, picking up the life stages where Add Health leaves off. Utilizing both datasets provides an opportunity to explore the effects of parental death on religiosity across life stages.

Descriptive statistics Approximately 2,518 young adult respondents in the Add Health sample had at least one parent die by Wave 4. Broken down by gender, 10.9% of men and 13.4% of women experienced parental death. Father loss is more common for both male and female respondents, occurring for 11.0% and 12.4%, respectively. Mother loss was experienced by 5.2% of men and 5.5% of women in the sample (note: percentages for mother and father loss by gender do not add up to the percentages for parental death because some respondents experienced the death of both parents). The MIDUS sample shows that the majority of respondents experienced parental death (1,123 compared with 330). Overall, 70.2% and 92.3% of respondents had their mother or father die, respectively, with approximately 24.9% of mother losses and 71.2% of father losses occurring between survey waves. Approximately 71.9% of men and 70.7% of women experienced father loss, while 55.1% of men and 53.4% of women experienced mother loss. I concentrate on a few measures of religiosity, while acknowledging my earlier statement on the problematic nature implicit in operationalizing an individual’s lived experience with religion for secondary data analysis. Specific to the two datasets overviewed previously, there are objective and subjective measures of religiosity that, when taken together, provide an adequate picture of the religious lives of American adults. For the younger group of respondents (Add Health), men and women who experienced parental death report slightly higher levels of all religious outcomes than their peers whose parents are living. Bereaved children report higher average frequency of attending religious services and prayer. These bereaved respondents report that their faith is important to them (religious salience) and that they turn to their religious or spiritual beliefs to help them with their problems (reliance) at higher levels than do nonbereaved children. 213

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Similarly, respondents in the MIDUS sample who experienced parental death are marginally more religious across most measures than those who have not experienced parental loss. Men and women who experienced parental death report higher average frequency of religious service attendance and prayer. Additionally, bereaved respondents report that they are religious and that their religion is important to them at higher levels than do respondents who have not experienced parental death, although levels of self-reported spirituality and its salience are approximately equal between subgroups. Finally, men and women who experienced parental death say they seek comfort through religious or spiritual means when they have problems or difficulties at slightly higher levels than do non-bereaved respondents.

Effects of parental death on religiosity For all subsequent analyses, I use simple ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models, and will report only ‘statistically significant’ findings, which in the field of sociology is commonly set at p < .05. This statistic means we expect that 95% of the time, these results will accurately represent the population from which the sample is drawn.The models that follow each examine different dynamics in the associations between parental death and religion as indicated by the literature described previously. Emphases include main effects of experiencing parental death, changes in religiosity following parental death, age at experience of parental death, and gender of deceased parent and bereaved child. The first set of statistical models uses Add Health to compare religiosity indicators of young adult men and women who lost a parent to those who have not experienced parental death, while controlling for a range of sociodemographic factors (i.e. sex, race, age, income, education, marital and parental status, and whether the respondent lived with their mother or father as an adolescent). Generally, experiencing parental death is associated with higher levels of private, personal religiosity in terms of religious salience, prayer, and reliance, regardless of variation in sociodemographic factors. This finding indicates that young adults who experienced parental death are more religious on average than their peers who have not experienced parental death, regardless of sociodemographic context. The relationship between losing a parent and religious service attendance, an institutional, public measure of religious behavior, was not statistically significant with or without control variables. When we turn to adults further along in the life course, for all MIDUS respondents, experiencing parental death affects higher average levels of self-reported religiousness and religious salience, although these findings are only significant without control variables. These findings indicate that parental death is associated with higher religiousness among older adults, but that these effects are explained by sociodemographic factors. However, experiencing parental death is statistically significant in affecting lower average levels of religious service attendance, controlling for all sociodemographic variables included in subsequent models. Taken together, these first statistical models show that parental death is associated with higher levels of religious salience across the life course, although sociodemographic factors seem to explain these effects after young adulthood. Additionally, in mid-to-older adulthood, but not in young adulthood, parental death is associated with lower religious service attendance. This could be described tentatively as a ‘reversal of religiosity’ with aging. A second set of analyses examines change in religiosity after experiencing parental death. In these models, the respondent’s (respective) first wave indicator of religiosity is included so that a positive or negative effect indicates an increase or decrease in religiosity from levels prior to parental death. For young adults in the Add Health sample, men and women who experienced parental death between waves reported increased levels of religious salience and prayer, 214

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regardless of variation in sociodemographic factors. Interestingly, however, in the MIDUS sample, respondents who experienced parental death between waves report decreased levels of selfreported spirituality, regardless of variation in sociodemographic factors. These findings indicate that the association between parental death and religious outcomes varies by stage in the life course. They also provide support for a multifaceted approach to measuring and understanding religiosity and how it is affected by parental death, especially in terms of differences in religiousness, spirituality, and salience for men and women across the life course. A third set of analyses evaluates whether the effects of parental death on religiosity vary by life-course stage. These models using the Add Health data include a set of dichotomous variables for parental death during three life stages: childhood (ages 0 to 12), adolescence (ages 13 to 19), and young adulthood (ages 20 to 34). Any effects of these variables are in reference to respondents in Add Health who have not experienced parental death. Men and women who experienced parental death during childhood or young adulthood report higher levels of believing their faith is important to them relative to those who have not experienced parental death, regardless of variation in sociodemographic factors. There is no effect for experiencing parental death during adolescence for religious salience; however, experiencing parental death during adolescence is associated with higher levels of turning to one’s faith for help with personal problems (relative to those who have not experienced parental death, and regardless of variation in sociodemographic factors). These findings indicate that parental death affects bereaved children’s religiosity differently depending on the stage in the life course when they experienced the death. Utilizing the MIDUS sample facilitates the examination of the effect of parental death in life stages beyond those represented in Add Health. In addition to the three stages mentioned previously, dichotomous variables for two more life stages were constructed for analyses using the MIDUS sample: mid-adulthood (ages 35 to 60) and older adulthood (beyond 60 years of age). Men and women who experienced parental death during mid-adulthood or older adulthood report higher average levels of being religious and religious salience, as well as higher frequency of religious service attendance, relative to those who have not experienced parental death, without control variables. Additionally, respondents who experienced parental death during older adulthood report higher average frequency of prayer, relative to those who have not experienced parental death, without control variables.These findings indicate that parental death is associated with higher levels of religiosity for adults, but adding contextual factors to the models explains away the effects of parental death. Because the significant effects of parental death during childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood in the Add Health sample did not hold in the MIDUS sample, we may suspect that the strength of parental death effects may dissipate over time. The final set of analyses explores differences in parental death by gender of child and parent. For these models, dichotomous variables were created for female or male respondents losing a mother or father, respectively. Effects for these four dichotomous variables are in reference to respondents who have not experienced parental death. In the Add Health sample, women who experienced father loss reported higher average levels on all religion variables, regardless of variation in sociodemographic factors. Men who experienced mother loss reported lower average levels of all religion variables (with the exception of salience), without control variables. These findings indicate that bereaved daughters of fathers turn toward their faith, while bereaved sons of mothers turn away from religion (although sociodemographic factors explain these effects for men). For same-gender parent-child relationships, women who experienced mother loss had higher average levels of prayer and religious reliance, regardless of variation in sociodemographic factors. The effects of parental death between survey waves were significant and robust only for bereaved daughters. Women who experienced mother loss between waves had increased frequency of prayer, and women who experienced father loss between waves reported increased 215

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religious salience, and frequency of prayer and religious service attendance, regardless of variation in sociodemographic factors. These findings indicate that parental death affects increased religiosity for women generally, but in different ways depending on whether they experience mother or father loss. Similar analyses were conducted in MIDUS, the results of which support those found in the Add Health sample. Women who experienced father loss had higher average levels of selfreported religiousness, religious salience, frequency of prayer, and seeking comfort from religion, regardless of variation in sociodemographic factors. Men who experienced mother loss reported lower average levels of religious service attendance, net of controls. These findings reinforce an association between increased religiosity among women losing fathers, and decreased religiosity among men losing mothers. Subsequently, men who experienced father loss reported lower average levels of all religion variables, regardless of variation in sociodemographic factors, indicating that parental death is associated with lower religiosity for men. For respondents experiencing parental death between survey waves, women who experienced mother loss between waves had increased levels of self-reported religiousness and spirituality, as well as frequency of religious service attendance, without control variables. Finally, men who experienced mother loss had decreased average levels of self-reported spirituality and religious salience, regardless of variation in sociodemographic factors. Again, these findings corroborate the pattern that parental death affects increased religiosity among women and decreased religiosity among men. The assessment of the preceding two datasets yields four notable conclusions concerning the relationship between parental death and religion: Parental death is associated with higher average levels of subjective indicators of bereaved child religiosity in both datasets. 2 Experiencing the death of a parent between survey waves affects increased frequency of prayer and increased self-reported religious salience in the Add Heath sample and decreased self-reported spirituality in the MIDUS sample. 3 Experiencing parental death across stages in the life course is associated with higher levels of several indicators of religiosity, relative to non-bereaved men and women. 4 Gendered effects of parental death indicate that in both samples, mother and father loss are associated with higher levels of religiosity for women, and lower levels of religiosity for men. 1

5  Future directions More research examining the relationship between parental death and religion should be conducted to identify what factors influence the gender differences found in these analyses of the associations between religion and parental death. The findings in this chapter highlight several surprising dynamics between the sex of both the bereaved child and the deceased parent that should be more deeply explored. Second, religiosity as a moderator of other outcomes following parental death, including dimensions of mental and physical well-being, should be investigated more thoroughly. Finally, future studies should continue to consider the differences in effects of parental death on religiosity by life stage in which men and women experienced parental death, as well as if and how the effects of parental death on religiosity may change over time. Key words: grief, parental death, religious belief, American religious beliefs

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Acknowledgments This research uses data from Add Health, a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and funded by grant P01 HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from twenty-three other federal agencies and foundations. Special acknowledgment is due to Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Information on how to obtain the Add Health data files is available on the Add Health website (www.cpc.unc.edu/addhealth). No direct support was received from grant P01-HD31921 for this analysis. Since 1995 the MIDUS study has been funded by the following: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network, National Institute on Aging (P01-AG020166), and National institute on Aging (U19-AG051426).

Further reading Bender, C. (2012) Religion on the Edge: De-centering and Re-centering the Sociology of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. This book is a reexamination of the traditional theoretical and empirical approaches to the sociology of religion, several of which are addressed briefly in this chapter. Bender’s compilation is especially useful for its concrete recommendations for improving the sociological study of religion. Davie, G. (2013) The Sociology of Religion: A Critical Agenda. Los Angeles: Sage. Davie’s research offers a comparative analysis of the development of theory and research in the sociology of religion, historically and geographically. Pargament, K. I. (2001) The Psychology of Religion and Coping: Theory, Research, Practice, New York: Guilford Press. Pargament’s many valuable contributions to the psychology of religion are both theoretically and practically significant. This book is one example of his engaging and thoughtful works of scholarship. Smith et al. (2013) ‘Roundtable on the Sociology of Religion: Twenty-three Theses on the Status of Religion in American Sociology-A Mellon Working-group Reflection,’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 81, pp. 903–938. Smith and colleagues provide a self-reflective assessment and critique of American sociology’s treatment of religion. This necessary and important work offers suggestions for improvement in the study of religion in sociology.

Bibliography Angell, G. B., Dennis, B. and Dumain, L. (1998) ‘Spirituality, Resilience, and Narrative: Coping with Parental Death,’ Families in Society:The Journal of Contemporary Social Services, 79, pp. 615–630. Balk, D. (1983) ‘Adolescents’ Grief Reactions and Self-concept Perceptions Following Sibling Death: A Study of 33 Teenagers,’ Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 12, pp. 137–161. Bender, C. (2012) Religion on the Edge: De-centering and Re-centering the Sociology of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cait, C.-A. (2004) ‘Spiritual and Religious Transformation in Women Who were Parentally Bereaved as Adolescents,’ OMEGA-Journal of Death and Dying, 49, pp. 163–181. Calhoun, L. G. and Tedeschi, R. G. (1990) ‘Positive Aspects of Critical Life Problems: Recollections of Grief,’ OMEGA-Journal of Death and Dying, 20, pp. 265–272. Davie, G. (2013) The Sociology of Religion: A Critical Agenda. Los Angeles: Sage. Davis, C. G. and Nolen-Hoeksema, S. (2001) ‘Loss and Meaning: How do People Make Sense of Loss?,’ American Behavioral Scientist, 44, pp. 726–741.

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Renae Wilkinson DeFrain, J., Millspaugh, E. and Xie, X. (1996) ‘The Psychosocial Effects of Miscarriage: Implications for Health Professionals,’ Families, Systems, & Health, 14, p. 331. Geertz, C. (1966) ‘Religion as a Cultural System,’ in: Banton, M. (ed). Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion. London: Tavistock, pp. 1–46. Gilbert, K. R. (1992) ‘Religion as a Resource for Bereaved Parents,’ Journal of Religion and Health, 31, pp. 19–30. Harris, E. S. (1991) ‘Adolescent Bereavement Following the Death of a Parent: An Exploratory Study,’ Child Psychiatry and Human Development, 21, pp. 267–281. Harris, K. M., Halpern, C.T.,Whitsel, E., Hussey, J.,Tabor, J., Entzel, P. and Udry, J. R. (2009) ‘Study Design,’ [online] Add Health: The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Available at: www.cpc. unc.edu/projects/addhealth/design. [Accessed 28 February 2017]. Hines Smith, S. (2002) ‘ “Fret No More My Child . . . For I’m All Over Heaven All Day”: Religious Beliefs in the Bereavement of African American, Middle-aged Daughters Coping with the Death of an Elderly Mother,’ Death Studies, 26, pp. 309–323. Lenhardt, A. M. C. and McCourt, B. (2000) ‘Adolescent Unresolved Grief in Response to the Death of a Mother,’ Professional School Counseling, 3, p. 189. Loveland, G. G. (1968) ‘The effects of bereavement on certain religious attitudes and behavior,’ Sociological Symposium, 1, pp. 17–27. Marks, N. F., Jun, H. and Song, J. (2007) ‘Death of Parents and Adult Psychological and Physical Well-being: A Prospective U.S. National Study,’ Journal of Family Issues, 28, pp. 1611–1638. Midlife in the United States (2011) ‘MIDUS – Midlife in the United States, A National Longitudinal Study of Health and Well-being’. Available at: http://midus.wisc.edu/scopeofstudy.php. [Accessed 17 July 2017]. Pargament, K. I. (2001) The Psychology of Religion and Coping: Theory, Research, Practice. New York: Guilford Press. Pargament, K. I., Ensing, D. S., Falgout, K., Olsen, H., Reilly, B., Van Haitsma, K. and Warren, R. (1990) ‘God Help Me:(I): Religious Coping Efforts as Predictors of the Outcomes to Significant Negative Life Events,’ American Journal of Community Psychology, 18, pp. 793–824. Pargament, K. I., Koenig, H. G. and Perez, L. M. (2000) ‘The Many Methods of Religious Coping: Development and Initial Validation of the RCOPE,’ Journal of Clinical Psychology, 56, pp. 519–543. Pargament, K. I., Smith, B. W., Koenig, H. G. and Perez, L. (1998) ‘Patterns of Positive and Negative Religious Coping with Major Life Stressors,’ Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 37, pp. 710–724. Park, C. L. (2005) ‘Religion as a Meaning-Making Framework in Coping with Life Stress,’ Journal of Social Issues, 61, pp. 707–729. Robbins, M. A. (1990) ‘Mourning the Myth of Mother/hood: Reclaiming our Mothers’ Legacies,’ Women & Therapy, 10, pp. 41–59. Schafer, M. H. (2009) ‘Parental Death and Subjective Age: Indelible Imprints from Early in the Life Course?’ Sociological Inquiry, 79, pp. 75–97. Scharlach, A. and Fuller-Thomson, E. (1994) ‘Coping Strategies Following the Death of an Elderly Parent,’ Journal of Gerontological Social Work, 21, pp. 85–100. Schwartzberg, S. S. and Janoff-Bulman, R. (1991) ‘Grief and the Search for Meaning: Exploring the Assumptive Worlds of Bereaved College Students,’ Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 10, pp. 270–288. Smith et al. (2013) ‘Roundtable on the Sociology of Religion: Twenty-three Theses on the Status of Religion in American Sociology-A Mellon Working-group Reflection,’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 81, pp. 903–938. Sorokin, P. A. (1961) Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology and Related Sciences. Chicago: H. Regnery. U.S. Public Becoming Less Religious (2015) Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C. Wortmann, J. H. and Park, C. L. (2009) ‘Religion/Spirituality and Change in Meaning After Bereavement: Qualitative Evidence for the Meaning Making Model,’ Journal of Loss & Trauma, 14, pp. 17–34. Zinnbauer, B. J., Pargament, K. I., Cole, B., Rye, M. S., Butter, E. M., Belavich, T. G., Hipp, K. M., Scott, A. B. and Kadar, J. L. (1997) ‘Religion and spirituality: Unfuzzying the fuzzy.’ Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, pp. 549–564.

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18 ASHES TO ASHES Continuing bonds in young adulthood in the Netherlands Renske Visser

1 Introduction The role ashes play in memorial strategies and the way ashes are incorporated in Dutch people’s everyday lives have received little scholarly attention. This lack of attention can be explained partly by the fact that until recently Dutch people were not allowed to take the ashes into their homes, and the disposal of ashes was done by professionals (Heessels, Poots and Venbrux, 2012; Mathijssen, 2017). Another important reason for this lack of attention is that studies concerned with death and dying have predominantly been conducted in English speaking countries, specifically in the United Kingdom and United States. Cann and Troyer (2017) argue that despite a ‘common language,’ these two territories have a vastly different history in researching death. The different uses of terminology and phrases to describe similar observations illustrate the distinctions between studies of death and dying in the United Kingdom and the United States. Whereas British scholars predominantly speak of ‘ashes,’ for example, American scholars speak of ‘cremated remains,’ or ‘cremains.’ Compared to the United States and the United Kingdom, much less research has been conducted in the Netherlands. While Cann and Troyer observe differences between scholars from two countries that share the same language, the research on countries that do not have English as their native tongue also is disseminated in English. Compared to Dutch, English is quite a rich language in terms of words and phrases concerned with death and dying. For example, in English a distinction is made between grief and mourning, whereas in Dutch these concepts are described by the same word: rouwen. This example points to just one of the ways in which language and context influence the way people talk about and cope with death, dying, and bereavement. While this chapter does not aim to make general claims about a ‘Dutch way’ of death and dying, there are several things that shape the way Dutch people cope with death. As the Netherlands is a highly secularized country, it has been argued that the majority of mourning rituals have disappeared (Wouters, 2002). In the twentieth century, the Netherlands has changed from one of the most Christian countries, to one of the most secular countries in Europe (Heessels, 2012). This change is reflected in the participants in this study. None of the participants in this study identified with any kind of religion. One of the commonalities between practices of remembering is the creativity that Dutch people employ in funerals (Venbrux, Heessels and 219

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Bolt, 2008; Venbrux, Peelen and Altena, 2009). An important feature of Dutch funerals is to have a personalized ceremony, tailored specifically to the deceased person (Venbrux, Peelen and Altena, 2009). Funeral professionals are increasingly playing a bigger part in performing and arranging the aforementioned personal funerals (Venbrux, Peelen and Altena, 2009). Studies on death in the Netherlands often focus on changes in funeral, cremation, and burial practices (Enklaar, 1995; Heessels, 2012). Furthermore, these studies often emphasize the public manifestation of grief, such as the shrines alongside roads that remember people who died from car accidents (Klaassens, Groote and Huigen, 2009) or the collective mourning that occurs after the death of a famous person (Stengs, 2009). This chapter examines a different manifestation of mourning and grief in Dutch culture and studies the private relationships people have with objects.Very little research explores how contemporary Dutch people cope with grief and loss behind closed doors. With the exception of a study by Wojtkowiak and Venbrux (2009) that discusses ‘home memorials’ in the Netherlands, there are rarely any studies available on memorials or mementos inside the homes of people. Wojtkowiak and Venbrux explore whether these memorials reflect new forms of religiosity in a secularizing country. Yet they do not address important questions concerning the profound meaning of these memorials and the feelings they evoke. This chapter builds upon research conducted in 2012, which was subsequently published in 2015 (see Visser and Parrott, 2015). Eight young adults (ages 22–30) participated in interviews exploring the role objects play in coping with the loss of a parent. The participants lost either their father or mother in their late teens or early 20s. The majority of participants lost their parent to health conditions such as cancer, heart failure, or diabetes. One of the fathers died in a car accident. This study gathered data through in-depth repeat interviews conducted in Dutch. All but one interview took place in the living space of the participants. As the focus of this project was on objects, this locale seemed appropriate and convenient since the objects would be at hand. However, participants were given the option of choosing a different place for the interview. In general, interviews lasted between 1 and 2 hours and the second interview took place a month after the first interview. The published results of this study outline the myriad of tactics and keepsakes used by the young adults. They commemorated their lost parent using adornments (e.g. tattoos incorporating the ashes and jewellery) in ways that kept the memory of their parent emotionally and physically close; they curated memory objects and displays in their living spaces and online, although this was constrained by the temporary nature of their living arrangements and moderated by the need to appear like any other “normal” young adult among their housemates, peers and online social networks. Visser and Parrott, 2015: pp. 30, 31 The chapter illustrates both the creativity in displays and memorial strategies, as well as the need to be ‘normal.’ The young adults were all very concerned with remembering their parent in the ‘right’ way, and feeling the ‘right’ things. While within Death Studies continuing bonds theory is gaining ground (Klass, Silverman and Nickman, 1996;Valentine, 2008), this notion was not part of their understanding of grief. The idea that one should ‘get over’ a loss was strongly present in the narratives of these young adults. Their narrative conflicted with their strategies of keeping their parents close. In other words, the strategies that these Dutch young adults employ showed a conflict between ‘holding on’ and ‘letting go.’ As the majority of mourning rituals have disappeared in the Netherlands (Wouters, 2002), and none of the participants were religiously affiliated, they felt quite helpless and concerned with grieving and mourning in the 220

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‘right way.’ They often sought guidance from the researcher by asking if what they were doing was appropriate. This chapter builds on this work by focusing on the way participants used ashes in their commemoration strategies. Within this sample, four parents were buried and four were cremated. As a consequence, this chapter will focus on those four participants who received the cremated remains of their parents. While only a very small sample, the examples presented in the sections below demonstrate the range of ideas on what is and is not considered ‘appropriate’ when handling or disposing of cremated remains. Two broad ways of dealing with the ashes were identified: either the ashes were kept as a whole, or the ashes were split up into numerous smaller portions and incorporated in a range of objects. The difference between these two strategies in the treatment of the ashes will be discussed in this chapter. This chapter unfolds in five sections. First, this chapter briefly supplies the history of cremation practices in the Netherlands. Second, this chapter then focuses on the participants who kept the ashes together as a whole. This study particularly focuses on the case of Tess, who scattered her mother’s ashes during the course of this project on the ten-year anniversary of her mother’s death. Third, this chapter then explores the instances in which participants divided the ashes for use in multiple ways. Fourth, this study then surveys the use of ashes in memorial tattoos. This study finally concludes noting the ways in which the innovative use of ashes connects to broader themes found in the study of grief and mourning in Dutch culture.

2  Cremation in the Netherlands The Dutch have practiced cremation for a little over a century, with the first cremation occurring in the Netherlands in 1914. Since then, the number of cremations has steadily risen, with 62% of all funerals involving a cremation in 2016.1 Officially cremations were not legal until 1955. The last century has seen many changes in the disposal of ashes. Heessels et al. (2012) argue that two trends have led to the increase in the prevalence of ash objects. First, citizens’ initiatives to expand the laws on ash disposal increased the use of ash objects in Dutch society. Prior to 1991 Dutch citizens were prohibited from taking the ashes home. Professionals in the funerary industry strictly oversaw the disposal of ashes (Mathijssen, 2017). ‘Eventually, in 1998, the Burial and Cremation Act was amended, officially allowing the division of cremation ashes into parts, enabling mourners to give different destinations to the ashes and to scatter ashes themselves’ (Heessels, Poots and Venbrux, 2012: p. 469). Following this legal change, various artists and funeral industry professionals offered their services to create memorial objects that either contained or incorporated the ashes. The second trend that has been visible since the 1960s is that the Netherlands has rapidly secularized leading to many people not claiming any religious affiliation. This development shaped the way people thought about – and responded to – death, dying, and the handling of ashes. Currently, the bereaved can collect the ashes approximately three weeks after the cremation. The crematorium generally informs them of when the ashes will be ready via a letter (Mathijssen, 2017). The remainder of this chapter focuses on the range of ways Dutch young adults deal with ashes.

3  The dynamics of ashes Tess was 27 when she was interviewed for the initial study. I interviewed Tess twice; shortly before and shortly after the ten-year anniversary of her mother’s death.Tess’s mother passed away as a result of cancer. Doctors first diagnosed Tess’s mother with breast cancer when Tess was 11. The cancer returned five years later, spreading throughout her body. The prolonged nature of 221

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the illness allowed Tess’s mother to anticipate her own death and to reflect on the impact of her death on the lives of her daughters. Tess remarked that, shortly before her mother’s death, her mother stated her teenage daughters were too young to lose their mother. Tess had just turned 17, and her younger sister was only 15. Because of their age, their mother clarified that she did not want her ashes to be scattered until the entire family was ready for the event. The daughters honored their mother’s wishes by not scattering her ashes until the ten-year anniversary of her passing. The ashes of Tess’s mother travelled quite a journey over those ten years before the scattering. The ashes were displayed in an urn on a mantelpiece in the living room of her parental home for the first five years. Kellaher et al. (2005) argue, The potentially transgressive act of retaining the residue of a relative’s body in the private home or garden can generate a special sense of intimacy, one which may partly be intensified as a result of actively inverting the customary practice of locating the remains of the dead in a public space. Kellaher, Prendergast and Hockey, 2005: p. 238 This intimacy was first achieved when the urn was displayed on the mantel piece. Tess stated: ‘I remember it well. Whenever I felt sad – especially in the beginning – I would grab the urn and talk to it in the middle of the night.’ By caressing and talking to the urn she was continuing the bond with her mother. The proximity of the urn provided comfort during the initial grieving period. After five years her father transferred the ashes in, what Tess described as, ‘some sort of Tupperware box; air and watertight’ and buried this in the back garden. While this action meant that the ashes were a bit further removed, they were still ‘close.’ The ashes remained there for another five years, until the tenth anniversary of the death. The family retrieved the box on the tenth anniversary of the death so that they could scatter the ashes. Her mother expressed her wish to be scattered in France, at the last place she enjoyed a holiday and felt like a ‘healthy’ person. Although the trip was a family holiday, Tess did not join her family on that occasion. She rather travelled on holiday with her then boyfriend. She now regretted this decision. The scattering of the ashes was the first time that Tess travelled to the location. While regretting not joining her family on the trip, she also commented that she was glad she had never been there before, as she would not want any pleasant family memories to be ‘poisoned’ with the memories of scattering her mother’s remains. They left the Netherlands early in the morning to drive to France. Tess comments: It was beautiful. She wanted to be scattered in the river. In the first instance she wanted to be scattered from the bridge, but that was not very practical because it was very windy. And you are not alone, you know, there were people driving [across the bridge]. And it has to be quite an intimate moment, so the bridge just did not feel right. So we drove to the holiday park we were staying and found a ruin along the river. The river was pretty wild. But alongside the river we found this ruin and it offered us shelter. In this secluded place, they decided to scatter the ashes. Until that point, Tess had never seen human ashes in her life. It was very strange to see the ashes. I had different ideas about it, but those were based on television. There [the ashes] look like an ashtray. Slightly dusty. But it was white. Little white pieces. And you could see pieces that looked like bot textuur [bone texture], 222

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very tiny fragments, and black. It was very polished, and not very powdery. It was a very strange experience. Her father brought three silver Haags Lofje brand spoons from home.These spoons had a decorative pattern so that when set facing downwards on a table the Haags Lofje pattern would show. Spoon by spoon they scattered the ashes. When all of the ashes were floating down the river, they each placed a rose in the river, similar to the rose that they laid on their mother’s coffin during the funeral. After the scattering, her father wanted to put down the spoons facing downwards, or ‘closed.’ He used this action as a ritual to symbolically close this period of his life. Firstly, my dad burned his wedding suit. My mum was cremated in her wedding dress. She said [to my dad]: you got me in my wedding dress, so you can give me away in my wedding dress too. My father thought it was time to burn his wedding suit too, as he is continuing his life with another woman. So this was something extra for him. Tess did not appreciate her father’s choice to burn the suit at the time of the ash disposal. Her father chose this moment to end the relationship with her mother, so that he could continue his life with his second wife.Yet for Tess, this was a moment to continue the bond with her mother. She did not want this moment to mark ‘the end.’ On the one hand Tess was hurt by this action, and her father was hurt by her expression of disapproval of this action on this particular day.The burning of the wedding suit was one of many rituals over which Tess and her father disagreed on what memorial practices were appropriate. As described in Visser and Parrott (2015), they had arguments over the choices her father had made in the parental home, in order to ‘make space’ for his new wife. Conceptions of the correct or incorrect means of ash disposal often reflect a broader context of personal relationships and continuing bonds. Mathijssen (2017) argues that ‘[t]he ashes are entangled in social relationships, with the living as well as the (other) dead, and the identity of the deceased strongly determines the appropriateness of the place and time to dispose the ashes’ (2017: p. 39).The relationship between ashes and the living is complex, as is evident in the case of Tess and her family. Another layer of complexity is added when the deceased provides specific wishes for their own disposal. Alongside having differing ideas from her father, Tess also navigated the wishes of her mother who was quite involved in designing her own funeral. Moreover, Tess’s mother expressed the desire of ‘remaining as a whole.’ She did not want her ashes to be split up in smaller portions. This wish of keeping the ashes together conflicted with Tess’s desire to keep some of the ashes. Tess commented: She did not want us to keep any of the ashes. She was very explicit about that. Just after, no just before she died, we spoke about this with her. About a month before she died. I would have liked to have had a pendant with some of the ashes. But she said: No, I would like to keep all the ashes together. She did not like that idea [of splitting up the ashes], so we’ve kept everything together. In this statement we can see the agency the dead can have in determining the way the living commemorate and display their loss. In the first interview, when discussing the anticipated scattering of the ashes she commented: ‘Actually, I don’t feel the need any more [to keep any of the ashes]. I got my pictures, and little keepsakes. And in my ear, I am wearing her bellybutton piercing. No, I think that is enough.’ While Tess did not have any of the ashes, she did have various other ways to continue the bond with her mother with use of material goods (see Visser 223

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and Parrott, 2015). While she may have been hurt at first by her mother’s decision, acceptance of her mother’s wishes became easier over time and her personal wish to keep some of the ashes became obsolete. Whereas Tess’s mother provided instructions to keep her ashes together, Sjors personally did not like the idea of separating her father’s ashes into smaller pieces. Her father was cremated and subsequently buried in a graveyard near her house. This is an example of the way ash disposals can mimic traditional burial practices (Kellaher, Prendergast and Hockey, 2005). When asked if she would have liked to have kept some of the ashes, Sjors commented: He wouldn’t be complete anymore. I would have a piece, for example in a necklace. You could do anything with it, really. But then he would be incomplete in his own potje [little jar]. Would that be right? I don’t know. Sjors felt uncomfortable keeping any of the ashes and preferred them to be in a single place. Both in the case of Tess and in the case of Sjors we see how personal preferences and social circumstances shape the ways in which ashes are handled and disposed of. In contrast to these cases, we will now turn our discussion to Saskia and Esther, who both had several ash objects.

4  Multiple destinations In Saskia’s parental home stood a big urn with the majority of the ashes. She kept a smaller urn in her personal living space. She did not want her living room to be an obvious shrine since she shared her living space with a housemate. In addition to the smaller urn, she kept a glass piece of art that included some of the ashes. ‘This is handmade. They scatter some of the ashes on the inside which turns into a flowerlike shape. And in IKEA I bought these lamps that can light things from below, which causes a nice effect.’ By adding the lamp the artwork was transformed, at least for outsiders, into a mundane everyday object. In contrast to the small urn, the glass artwork could be displayed in the living room more easily, as it was less obviously a memento for the dead. Currently there is a wide range of urns and mementos available to contain ashes (Heessels, 2012). Esther had several Buddhas in various sizes filled with her father’s ashes. She displayed a large one on a side table in the living room and a smaller one on the dresser in her bedroom. The Buddha statues were an inside joke, and did not hint at any affiliation with Buddhism. Her father had been on medication for his heart problem, which made him retain water. As he was also bald, Esther and her mother would joke that he looked like Buddha: always smiling, and having a big belly. Esther found it important to keep her father close. As will be discussed in the next section, in order to keep a close bond forever, Esther acquired a small tattoo with some of the cremains mixed in the ink. Both Esther and Saskia had a heart-shaped pendant with some of the ashes incorporated in it. Two of Esther’s male cousins also had a pendant in the shape of a rod (staafje in Dutch). Esther’s grandmother had a picture frame with some of the ashes included in the edges of the frame. Esther commented that the ‘close family’ was allowed to ‘pick something.’ This statement suggests that there were options from which to ‘pick.’ Both Esther and Saskia had a range of small objects in which the ashes were incorporated. This versatility of mementos incorporating the ashes of loved ones reflects the creativity of the young adults. Given the professional nature of ash disposal, this observation begs the question: From where does this creativity stem? As has been argued by others, the funeral industry has played a big role in the disposal of ashes and currently offers many ways to display the ashes (Heessels, 2012; Heessels, Poots and Venbrux,

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2012). As the focus of this project was not specifically on ash objects, the present data does not offer clear-cut answers. The Buddha statues seem to suggest a creative way of thinking about urns, and are symbolic for her father as he ‘looked like a Buddha.’ At the same time, the funeral industry offers a number of urns in the shape of Buddha statues.This begs the question:To what extent are the Dutch creative in their memorial strategies and to what extent are they being led by a neoliberal market where they can pick things from a catalogue? Mathijssen (2017) correctly argues that the professionalization of the funeral industry in the Netherlands is a distinctive feature.This connection between professionalization and creativity is something that deserves more attention and needs further exploration.

5  Memorial tattoos Three out of the eight participants had a memorial tattoo. Davidson (2017: p. 35) identifies five features of memorial tattoos: their ability to continue bonds; their permanence; their role in adjusting to loss; their function for opening dialogue; and their presence as visual representations of change. Some of these themes were present in the way young adults spoke about their memorial tattoos, such as continuing bonds and having a permanent link with the deceased. In contrast, whereas participants in Davidson’s study welcomed people asking about the meaning of tattoos, the young adults in this study were ambivalent about such inquiries. The three tattoos, while all located in different places, were all strategically placed so they could be covered up and hidden when in public. This could be explained by the cultural context in which the tattoo placement occurs. While it is argued that the prevalence of tattoos is on the rise, it is suggested that in the Netherlands tattoos are still a barrier to employment (Dillingh, Kooreman and Potters, 2016). In the latest general elections a member of parliament was elected who openly wears a sleeve tattoo. The fact that he does not cover up his tattoo in parliament was considered newsworthy,2 showing that wearing tattoos in public functions is still considered unusual. At the same time, the news item exemplifies a change, as a clear message in the news report is that nowadays ‘even politicians are wearing tattoos.’ In this context, in which having a tattoo might decrease one’s chances on the job market, inquiries about tattoos can also be considered a judgment of character. In light of this cultural reality, it is not surprising that the Dutch young adults in this study are more hesitant in showing and discussing their tattoos, compared to people in North America who were part of Davidson’s (2017) study. Cann (2014) has argued that celebrities in the 1990s made tattoos more socially acceptable in the United States.This social change contributes to the cultural climate from which the practice of receiving memorial ash tattoos emerges. Cann (2014) suggests that the prevalence of tattoos containing cremated remains, at least in the United States, is growing. ‘These tattoos are not merely representational memorials, but actual literal memorials, with pieces of the dead firmly in place and forever part of the memorial embedded in the skin (2014: p. 74).’ A lot of popular culture from the United States, including programs like Miami Ink reach the Netherlands, but to what extent the same trend is occurring in the Netherlands is unclear. In 2005, Dutch folk singer André Hazes died. His ash disposal was probably one of the most eccentric in the Netherlands. His ashes were partly shot into the sky and, additionally, his wife and two children all received similar ash tattoos. In the public domain this is one of the most famous occurrences of ash tattoos. The prevalence of ash tattoos in the Netherlands is unknown but assumed to be rising (Heessels, Poots and Venbrux, 2012). In this chapter we will only look at Esther’s tattoo, as it was the only one with cremated remains incorporated in it.

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While talking about the process of getting her ash tattoo, Esther said the following: They have special ink [at the tattoo parlour]. I brought a small jar with ashes, and they mixed this with the ink. It has to soak and then they placed my tattoo. . . . But it is in a place, even if I would wear a bikini, it would be covered. Not everyone needs to see this. I am not really a tattoo person, but at least then I would know he would always be with me. And he loved tattoos. Both his arms were covered. So this is like a tribute. Esther received a heart-shaped tattoo, similar in shape to the pendant that she wears that contains some ashes inside. Esther deliberately placed the ash tattoo in an inconspicuous place so that very few people would ever see her tattoo. In this way she would never be confronted with unwanted questions, but always have her father in close proximity. Furthermore, it has been argued that tattoos (in general, not specifically memorial tattoos) are important in the shaping of identity (Sanders and Angus Vail, 2008; Cann, 2014). Changes in physical appearance can alter the way a person views herself or himself as well as the way she or he appears to others. In the case of Esther, the placement of the tattoo was not so much a change in her own identity, but more a continuation of her father’s identity within her. He was the one who loved tattoos and therefore she received a tattoo in his honor. She did not consider herself a ‘tattoo person’ (despite now having a tattoo) and anticipated she would not get another tattoo in the future. By mixing the ink with the ashes, she also mixed her father’s identity with her own. The parents of the participants who had the memorial tattoos without ashes were each buried, so there were no cremains to be incorporated. However, one participant Jolien described ‘closeness’ as one of the main reasons for getting her tattoo (see Visser and Parrott, 2015: p. 29). The third participant with a tattoo was Sjors. She did not like the idea of her father’s ashes being divided, a sentiment that likely ruled out the possibility of an ash tattoo. As cremation is currently the most common way of disposing of the body in the Netherlands it will be interesting to see if and how the occurrence of ash tattoos will develop in the future.

6 Conclusion Only recently have Dutch people been allowed to take the ashes home after a cremation. Ash memorials and ash disposals, therefore, are quite a new phenomenon within the Dutch context. This chapter has offered several examples of the ways in which Dutch young adults use ashes to continue the bond with their deceased parent. The preceding discussion distinguishes between memorial practices that keep the ashes together and memorial practices that divide the ashes into smaller portions. Whether the ashes are kept together or split up, the way ashes are used is not just about the relationship between the living and the deceased, but rather reflects a complex interaction between various social actors. The memorial practices that divided the ashes into multiple parts often used a variety of ash objects such as urns, Buddha statues with ashes, glass artwork, and ash tattoos. A similarity between both participants who divided the ashes was the heart shaped pendant which contained some of the ashes. This variety of objects, when considered in light of the role that professionals play in ash disposal (Heessels, 2012; Heessels, Poots and Venbrux, 2012; Mathijssen, 2017), raises the question whether the ‘creativity’ displayed in the range of objects is driven by the participants, or whether they are encouraged by funeral directors to make these purchases. As this is a new terrain within the funeral industry, many bereaved people, like the young adults in this study, are not clear about the rules and the ‘right’ way of mourning and displaying grief. Painfully, the person they would want to ask for guidance on this matter is often their deceased 226

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parent. More research is needed to explore this relationship between the funeral industry in the Netherlands and the personal rituals and displays of Dutch people. The creativity in ash objects could provide a way for continuing bonds theory to move into the public domain in the Netherlands. It will be interesting to see how ideas on the ‘holding on’ and ‘letting go’ dichotomy will develop within the Dutch context. Key words: ashes, cremains, tattoos, Dutch memorialization practices, Netherlands

Notes 1 See www.uitvaart.nl/infotheek/achtergronden/crematiecijfers. 2 See https://nos.nl/op3/artikel/2177010-tattoo-op-het-werk-misschien-heeft-je-baas-er-ook-wel-een. html.

Further reading Cann, C. K. (2014) Virtual Afterlives: Grieving the Dead in the Twenty-First Century. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. A comprehensive overview of current memorial practices in the United States. Valentine, C. (2008) Bereavement Narratives: Continuing Bonds in the Twenty-first Century. London: Routledge. A key study comparing the prevalence of continuing bonds in the UK and Japan. Various authors. Mortuary rituals in The Netherlands (2009) Mortality 14(2). A special issue of Mortality dedicated to current mortuary practices in the Netherlands. Visser, R. C. (2017) ‘ “Doing Death”: Reflecting on the Researcher’s Subjectivity and Emotions,’ Death Studies. Taylor & Francis, 41(1), pp. 6–13. A paper discussing the importance of reflecting on the cultural background and subjectivity of scholars researching death.

Bibliography Cann, C. K. (2014) Virtual Afterlives: Grieving the Dead in the Twenty-first Century. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. Cann, C. K. and Troyer, J. (2017) ‘Trans-Atlantic Death Methods: Disciplinarity Shared and Challenged by a Common Language,’ Mortality, 22 (2), pp. 105–117. Davidson, D. (2017) ‘Art Embodied: Tattoos as Memorials,’ Bereavement Care, 36(1), pp. 33–40. Dillingh, R., Kooreman, P. and Potters, J. J. J. M. (2016) ‘Tattoos, Life Style and the Labor Market,’ Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), pp. 1–29. Enklaar, J. (1995) Onder de groene zoden. De persoonlijke uitvaart. Zutphen: Alpha. Heessels, M. (2012) Bringing Home the Dead. Ritualizing Cremation in the Netherlands. Ph.D Dissertation. Radboud University Nijmegen. Heessels, M., Poots, F. and Venbrux, E. (2012) ‘In Touch with the Deceased: Animate Objects and Human Ashes,’ Material Religion, 8(4), pp. 466–489. Kellaher, L., Prendergast, D. and Hockey, J. (2005) ‘In the Shadow of the Traditional Grave,’ Mortality, 10(4), pp. 237–250. Klass, D., Silverman, M. and Nickman, S. (1996) Continuing Bonds: New Uunderstandings about Grief. London: Routledge. Klaassens, M., Groote, P. and Huigen, P. P. P. (2009) ‘Roadside Memorials from a Geographical Perspective,’ Mortality, 14(2), pp. 187–201. Mathijssen, B. (2017) ‘The Ambiguity of Human Ashes: Exploring Encounters with Cremated Remains in the Netherlands,’ Death Studies, 41(1), pp. 34–41. Sanders, C. R. and Angus Vail, D. (2008) Customizing the Body. The Art and Culture of Tattooing. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Stengs, I. (2009) ‘Death and Disposal of the People’s Singer:The Body and Bodily Practices in Commemorative Ritual,’ Mortality, 14(2), pp. 102–118.

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Renske Visser Valentine, C. (2008) Bereavement Narratives: Continuing Bonds in the Twenty-first Century. London: Routledge. Venbrux, E., Heessels, M. and Bolt, S. (eds). (2008) Rituele Creativiteit. Actuele veranderingen in de uitvaart-en rouwcultuur in Nederland. Zoetermeer: Meinema. Venbrux, E., Peelen, J. and Altena, M. (2009) ‘Going Dutch: Individualisation, Secularisation and Changes in Death Rites,’ Mortality, 14(2), pp. 97–101. Visser, R. C. and Parrott, F. R. (2015) ‘Stability and Change: The Role of Keepsakes and Family Homes in the Lives of Parentally Bereaved Young Adults in the Netherlands,’ Mortality, 20(1), pp. 19–35. Wojtkowiak, J. and Venbrux, E. (2009) ‘From Soul to Postself: Home Memorials in the Netherlands,’ Mortality, 14(2), pp. 147–158. Wouters, C. (2002) ‘The Quest for New Rituals in Dying and Mourning: Changes in the We-I Balance,’ Body & Society, 8(1), pp. 1–27.

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PART V

Questionable deaths and afterlives Suicide, ghosts, and avatars

19 EXEUNT The question of suicide at the origin of early Christianity* Michael J. Thate

1  Introduction: being and not-being At the heart of Western literature rests a question as familiar as it is often misunderstood: to be or not to be? That is the question for the young Dane – suffering or suicide? Earlier in the play, reflecting upon the haste of his mother Gertrude’s remarriage to his uncle, the prince laments of his weariness of life: Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, Or that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! O God, God! How wearing, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world! Hamlet 1.2.129–34 The wonderful play on ‘a dew’ with ‘adieu’ highlights the already obvious point of the tragedy: Hamlet wants out of the tedium of life. What stays his hand from what Karl Jaspers termed an ‘absolute action that transgresses life’ (Minois, 1999,: 326), however, is the Almighty’s sanction against this grave act, and the dread of that undefined ‘something after death’ (Hamlet 3.1). At the turn of the seventeenth century, the social imaginary of Christian Europe regarding the fate of those who vacated their station was firmly in place: Against self-slaughter There is a prohibition so divine Cymbeline 3.4.72–73 These canons, however – with their allowance for the lurid torture of suicide bodies and seizure of lands forfeited by the accursed (Vovelle, 1983; Chaunu, 1977; cf, Minois, 1999: p. 329) – were long in the making and hardly arrived all at once (cf. Minois, 1999). Moreover, fundamental uncertainties regarding matters of definition and opinion were present from the beginning of early Christianity and throughout late antiquity (de Ste Croix, 2006: pp. 153–200, esp. 231

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pp. 153–155). In an earlier Greek recension of the martyrdom of Carpus, for example – a text of the latter-half of the second century – a woman named Agathonike is pictured standing by as witness to the public execution of Carpus (Mart. Carpi [Greek] 44). Enraptured by the spectacle, she undresses and joins the martyr’s fire. Nothing in the text suggests that her fatal leap into the flames was qualitatively different than those of other martyrs (cf. Moss, 2012: p. 546). In the later Latin recension of the scene, however, Agathonike is subjected to formal processes of interrogation and sentencing (Mart. Carpi [Latin] 6.1–4). It is only after due process that her body is given to be burned (cf. Barnes, 1968: p. 514). This rewriting bears witness to the strange history and uncertain valuation of Mors voluntaria within early Christianity.The phenomenon of martyrdom itself, as G. W. Bowersock wrote in his important study on the subject, ‘must be reckoned’ as the ‘single most visible manifestation of Christianity in the pagan Roman world’ (Bowersock, 1995: p. 66). A great ‘confusion of categories’ and classifications, however, existed in differentiating noble ‘martyrdom’ from base exhibitionism (Bowersock, 1995: p. 62). Tertullian, for example, placed the desire to suffer at the very core of what it meant to be a Christian (cf. Apol. 50). Other interpreters, such as Clement of Alexandria, could commend the survivalist strategy of fleeing from city to city to avoid persecution (cf. Matt. 10:23). This brief chapter engages with some of these shifting attitudes toward ‘voluntary death’ within early Christianity in an attempt to reveal a fundamental confusion and anxiety toward death and bodies within its histories. The chapter consists of three movements which proceed in chronologically reverse order.The first is a reading of Augustine’s censure against voluntary death in his De civitate Dei contra paganos (The City of God against the Pagans written in 426 ce).The second is a reading of Ignatius’ strong desire to die the death of a martyr in his Epistle to the Romans (c. 110 ce).The third reads the death of Jesus as a voluntary death, thus planting an anxiety toward questions of suicide and imitation at the heart of Christianity’s subsequent development.

2  Fixed canons and prohibitions so divine Alongside the varying valuations of voluntary death throughout Christianity’s histories are the diffuse practices developed to dissuade those tempted by a desire to depart. Particularly during the so-called High Middle Ages, records indicate cruel postmortem judgments enacted upon the bodies of suicides. In 1257 Paris, for example, the body of a Parisian male was fished out of the Seine, condemned as a suicide and sentenced to gruesome torture. In 1278, a man killed himself in Reims.The monks of Saint-Rémi ordered the body dragged through the town and then hanged. Le Parlement de Paris, however, ordered the carcass to be handed over to the archbishop who alone held rights of execution. In 1288, a man living within the legal jurisdiction of the abbey of Sainte-Geneviève in Paris committed suicide. The abbey ordered the body hanged. The royal prévôt ordered a repeat execution owing to the abbey’s neglect to perform the rite of dragging the ‘murderer’ through the streets behind a horse (Minois, 1999: pp. 7–9). Such practices reflect enactments of the church’s developing official attitude. The Council of Toledo in 693 officially excommunicated suicides (Bryant, 2003: p. 1.314; Alvarez, 1970: p. 89; Duffy, 2011: p. 73). Twenty-one years earlier, the Council of Hertford formalized canons denying normal funerary rites to suicides (MacDonald, 1993: p. 19). Nils Retterstøl has cataloged the development of church attitudes toward suicide through varying councils (1993: pp. 16–18). Such official positions and brutal practices reveal a fundamental discomfort with the liminal state of those who left without permission. During the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries, this discomfort only grew. Mysterious rites appear during this period – such as ‘the rites of reversal’ which placed the suicide body face down, ‘lying north-south rather than in the usual east-west orientation’ which was considered ‘favorable for resurrection.’ A stake would also be 232

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driven through the body – intended both as a means to prevent resurrection, and also to prevent the body from ‘disturbing the living’ (Minois, 1999: pp. 75, 327). The body of a suicide was viewed not only as a ‘terrifying evocation of the forces of evil,’ but an infectious contagion as well (Minois, 1999: p. 74). These developments reflect a perennial challenge of definition (Durkheim, 2007). In later periods of the Middle Ages and early modernity, the challenge was in sorting between the suicide of the sane and the mistakes of the mad (Marsh, 2010; Gates, 1988; Strocchia, 2015; Craig, 2014; Foucault, 2006; Minois, 1999: pp. 77, 139, 193, 245). In early Christianity and late antiquity, the slippage between the honor of martyrdom and the shame of suicide approaches the heart of key issues within its introspection (Wyrwa, 1983: pp. 225–260). The first council of Carthage (348– 349 ce), in strong reaction to Donatism’s hard line on refusing forgiveness to those whom had renounced the faith during the persecutions of the Roman emperor Diocletian (303–305 ce), forbade the honorific title of ‘martyr’ to be given to those who destroyed themselves (cf. de Ste Croix, 2006: pp. 162 n. 27; 184, n. 98). Cyprian stated plainly that no one was to give themselves up to the pagans by their own initiative (Epist. 81.1.4). And yet Cyprian himself was not entirely consistent on this point. Though hardly the extremist Ignatius (whom we shall meet later), he himself approached his martyrdom with a measure of theatricality and staging: ‘It is in your midst [at Carthage and not Utica] that I ought to be making my confession, it is there [in my own episcopal city] I ought to suffer’ (Epist. 81.1.2). The lights were not bright enough in Utica. To die there would be a wasted death. Cyprian therefore moved the scenery of his sufferings so as to produce a larger and more influential spectacle. Moreover, members of his parish accompanied him to his execution and cried out to be allowed to join him in martyrdom (Passio Cypriani 5.1). Earlier arguments and censures were of course put forward. Jerome emphasized martyrdom was meaningless when done for the sake of one’s personal glory (Comm. in Ep. ad Galat. 5.14, 26; and, P.G. 26.410, 424). Clement of Alexandria in book four of his Stromateis addresses the issue, rejecting the Roman glorification of suicide represented by Tertullian or Justin (cf. Bowersock, 1995: p. 71). It was Augustine, however, particularly in Book One of The City of God, operating within the strong gravity of Platonic thought and also in strong reaction to Donatism, who formed perhaps the most forceful injunction against voluntary death (Bowersock, 1995: p. 73). De civitate Dei contra paganos is split between those who prefer their own gods as opposed to desiring the founder of the ‘glorious city God’ (civ. Dei 1.pref.) The fall of Rome is therefore but one episode within the long ‘histories of numberless wars’ while the city of God stands steadfast for eternity (civ. Dei 1.2). It is from a position of this ‘fixed stability’ upon the ‘eternal seat’ of the eternal city that Augustine calls for the endurance of all things (civ. Dei 1.pref.). Because one is seated in the eternal city, one can endure the tortures, trials, and even rapes, which may occur within the earthly city.Virtue and goodness flow to the soul from this eternal seat (civ. Dei 1.16). And if the will remains steadfast in this orientation nothing done to the body is the fault of the one who suffers (civ. Dei 1.16). This is the context within which Augustine concerns himself in Book 1 with an extended reflection on nobility and the status of sexual purity of the virgin suicides. Certain women feared the pollution of their bodies at the hands of the attacking pagans and thus chose to preserve their purity by ending their lives. By choosing suicide over the defilement of their bodies, Augustine claims the virgins ‘escape the crime’ of their abusers only to commit a ‘sin of their own’: viz., murder (civ. Dei 1.17). The lust of the rapist in Augustine’s view cannot ‘pollute’ the purity of the virgin. The body may fall prey to another’s will but the consent or refusal of the will remains firmly within the possession of the pure.There is therefore no compromise of their bodily sanctity.The sanctity of the soul ‘remains even when the body is violated.’Though forced into egregious acts ‘the sanctity of the body is not lost’ (civ. Dei 1.19). 233

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The famous and influential example of noble Lucretia’s honorable suicide after being raped by the Etruscan prince (cf. Matthes, 2001; Donaldson, 1982) is thus rebutted by Augustine. According to Augustine, there were two guilty parties. One committed adultery (i.e. the prince). The other slew an innocent and chaste woman (i.e. Lucretia; civ. Dei 1.19).The suicide of Lucretia, he argues, was no act of nobility but a performance of misplaced glory and fear. For Augustine, nobler are those Christian women who suffered as Lucretia did yet ‘declined to avenge upon themselves the guilt of others.’ In their souls they retain ‘the glory of chastity’ (civ. Dei 1.19). Augustine here is engaged in nothing short of a re-categorization of glory. Central to the civic structure of Rome was the parsing of the world into zones of honor and shame. Different gods and different cities determine differing schematics. The heroes of Rome therefore never quite align with the great cloud of witnesses lining the halls of the heavenly city. The ‘magnanimity’ of Cleombrotus – who after reading Plato immediately leapt from ‘the sweet detention of this life’ (civ. Dei 1.22) – and the nobility of Cato are therefore considered improperly bestowed honors as well (civ. Dei 1.23).The one exception within the halls of Rome’s honorable citizens is Marcus Regulus. For Augustine, Regulus is the ‘very noble example of the voluntary endurance of captivity in obedience to a religious scruple’ (civ. Dei 1.15). Having but ‘an earthly country to defend’ and ‘false gods,’ Regulus demonstrated true honor in choosing to suffer slavery as opposed to escape through suicide. How much more shall Christians then, asks Augustine, who worship the true God and are aspirants of a heavenly citizenship, shrink from the seductions of suicide (civ. Dei 1.25)? The law, ‘rightly interpreted’ of course, is clear: suicide is murder (civ. Dei 1.20). The exception of Samson only proves the rule for Augustine. The Spirit gave ‘secret instructions’ to the wayward judge to do so (civ. Dei 1.21). Suicide is a ‘detestable and damnable wickedness.’ The bodies and wills of others do not control the innocence of the afflicted. The threat of rape is thus preferable to an act of certain murder (civ. Dei 1.25).The lauded virgin suicides, particularly that of St. Pelagia, are therefore not models to follow but lessons from which to learn (civ. Dei 1.26). Augustine is clear: a body violated against one’s will is no evil; to kill oneself, however, is wicked (civ. Dei 1.27).1

3  A desire toward death The sharpening polemic against voluntary martyrdom within late antiquity reflects a persistent allure of the practice amidst shifting imageries. A desire to depart from the world can be at least an implicit judgment of the structure of the world – or, as Franco Beradi has it, the ‘becoming of the world’ (Berardi, 2015: p. 1; cf. Gutiérrez-Jones, 2015). Whatever form its nature may take, suggests Minois, throughout history power has attempted to ‘prevent and conceal suicide’ (Minois, 1999: p. 302). Unpermitted departures are an enactment of accusation brought against the organizers of society who are indifferent to the flourishing of its denizens (Minois, 1999: p. 326). Political power, then, in the name of social cohesion, ‘cannot admit the right to suicide’ (Minois, 1999: p. 303). If the becoming of the world was, in some sense at least, increasing in its Christian atmospherics, it is natural to see suspicions rise against the practices of voluntary martyrdom after the fourth century.Who would be persecuted in a Christian empire? And who would be doing the persecuting? Why Christians were persecuted at all is a complex topic adroitly covered elsewhere (de Ste Croix, 2006: pp. 105–152).Whatever the details may have been, the first few centuries were witness to a peculiar desire to acquire the ‘white robe’ of martyrdom (Rev. 6:11). C. Arrius Antoninus, who was proconsul of Asia during the second century, witnessed this desire first-hand when he was confronted by a group of Christians begging for death. Sensing the potential for social 234

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unrest, he directed the eager postulants to seek the nearest nooses or cliffs on their own accord (cf. Tert. ad Scap. 5). Similar scenes depicting this désir de mourir reflect what is described in the Acts of the Martyrs of Lyon as an ‘eagerness for martyrdom’ (τῆς μαρτυρίας ἐπιθυμία).2 The politically shrewd maneuvering of Antonius reveals at least two salient details regarding the views of Roman officials toward this eagerness for martyrdom. First, it was not exactly clear where the lines of ‘martyrdom’ ended and ‘suicide’ began. Second, this uncertain pale could cause derision from pagan authors ranging from Marcus Aurelius (cf. Lane Fox, 1988: p. 419; Brunt, 1979: p. 483) to Celsus (Orig., contra Cels. 8.39, 41, 55, 65). Both of these attitudes are present in Lucian’s mockery of Peregrinus who himself held an uncertain position within the valuations of early Christian writers. Long after giving up Christianity, Peregrinus continued to be heralded as being among the noble pagans who committed suicide by the likes of Tertullian (ad. Mart. 4). Though mocked by Lucian and others, his suicide made an undeniable impression (cf. de Ste Croix, 2006: p. 188, n. 110). ‘We want to suffer,’ as Tertullian has it, ‘just as a soldier wants to fight’ (Apol. 50). To be a Christian, in Tertullian’s understanding, is to live within this desire toward death. Tertullian’s argument is essentially a reprising of the Roman paganism of Cicero and Seneca but in a (Montanist) Christological key (de Corona Militis 1.4.4–5; cf. de exhort. cast. 13). Donatist Circumcellions of the fourth and fifth centuries carried voluntary martyrdom to the ‘most extreme lengths’ (de Ste Croix, 2006: p. 180). And yet, as de Ste Croix has masterfully demonstrated, such practices occurred ‘constantly,’ beginning in the Antonine period (138–193 ce) in the ‘very bosom of the Catholic Church, even though the dominant section of opinion in the Church disapproved of it’ (de Ste Croix, 2006: p. 183). This is seen clearly in Ignatius’ Epist. ad Rom. and what de Ste Croix refers to as his ‘pathological yearning for martyrdom’ (de Ste Croix, 2006: p. 189). Written while on his death march from Syria to his execution in Rome during the early second century, Ignatius voices a determination to die. His only fear is that his death might be thwarted by the entreaties of the Roman churches (Epist. ad Rom. 1.2; 4.1; 6.2; 7.1). He desires to be made a libation to God (σπονδισθῆναι θεῷ; Epist. ad Rom. 2.2). He boasts plainly that of his own volition (ἑκών) he dies for God (Epist. ad Rom. 4.1). Ignatius understands the path to the divine as passing through the mouths of beasts (Epist. ad Rom. 4.1). And, as he continues with no small measure of morbidity, ‘I am God’s wheat, and I am ground by the teeth of wild beasts that I may be found pure bread’ (Σῖτός εἰμι θεοῦ καὶ δι᾽ὀδόντων θηρίων ἀλήθομαι, ἵνα καθαρὸς ἄρτος εὑρεθῶ τοῦ Χριστοῦ; Epist. ad Rom. 4.1). The beasts are his ‘sepulcher’ (τάφος) and he desires to be swallowed whole as a ‘sacrifice’ (θυσία) to God (Epist. ad Rom. 4.2). He states he will ‘entice’ the animals to maul him promptly (Epist. ad Rom. 5.2), and fanaticizes over his coming torture (Epist. ad Rom. 5.3). He speaks of his desire to be ‘an imitator of the passion’ (μιμητὴν εἶναι του πάθους) of the divine Christ (Epist. ad Rom. 6:3), ‘lusting,’ as Lightfoot translates it (2017), ‘after death’ (Epist. ad Rom. 7.2).3 And, in addition to Ignatius’ self-described desire to die (Ep. ad Rom. 7.2), John Malalas and the Antiochene Acts of Ignatius (Chron. 11) portray his deliberate provocation of authorities (de Ste Croix, 2006: p. 189 n. 114; Lightfoot, 1889: III.ii pp. 477–495, 589–595). Ignatius’ death is dated to 107 by Eusebius (see Hübner, 1997; Schöllgen, 1998; and Vogt, 1999). Despite the apparent plausibility of Ignatius as a voluntary martyr, de Ste Croix questions the credibility of the evidence. Even so, he suggests Ignatius’ Epistle to the Romans can be read as a witness to ‘the existence in the early Church of a trend which was only too likely to lead to voluntary martyrdom, even at times when the authorities were not much inclined to persecute’ (de Ste Croix, 2006: pp. 180, 200). Where did this trend originate? What enticed this movement of desire toward death? Definitive lines would surely be drawn irresponsibly. Nevertheless, the metaphorical density of the originating fracture in life’s figurations finds profound resonance in the complex reception of the departure of Jesus. 235

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4  De imitatione Christi? As odd and extreme as the case of Ignatius might appear, we find no disapproval or censure of it in what remains of the early Christian material. Just the opposite appears to be the case in Irenaeus’ quotation of Ignatius’ gruesome image of the wheat of God ground to pure bread by the teeth of savage beasts (Adv. Haeres. 5.28.4; cf. Eusebius H.E. 3.36.2–15). This pathological enthusiasm for death, Bowersock suggests, is undeniably near the ‘desire to commit suicide’ (1995: p. 61). In this sense, it is curious that Ignatius articulates his desire for death as an imitation of the passion of the divine Christ (Epist. ad Rom. 6.3). The near-suicidal desire of Ignatius is thus patterned after his interpretation of that same desire in Christ. Jesus was cast as the faithful witness (ὁ μάρτυς ὁ πιστός) in John’s Apocalypse (Rev. 1:5 and 3:14). And, against the passive voice of the explication of Jesus’ death in the Apostles’ Creed, the testimony of the Gospel of John (10:15, 18) is radically active: ‘I give my life of my own accord’ (οὐδεὶς αἴρει αὐτὴν ἀπ᾽ ἐμοῦ, ἀλλ᾽ ἐγὼ τίθημι αὐτὴν ἀπ᾽ ἐμαυτοῦ). Earlier in John’s Gospel (8:22), the Pharisees wondered among themselves if Jesus was planning to kill himself (μήτι ἀποκτενεῖ ἑαυτόν). Such a question had to arise out of some prevailing sentiment. In Clement of Alexandria’s understanding, Christ defines martyrdom (Strom. IV.9.70.1). And, as Origen contends, ‘if we do not have scruples about the terms, but when we look to their realities we do not discover other terms to use for the realities – perhaps, if I may put it this way, Jesus killed himself.’ Origen, of course, qualifies Jesus suicide as conducted in a ‘divine manner’ (Origen, 1993: p. 190). In whatever manner it might have been conducted, however, its effective force was the creation of a field in which voluntary death could become a desired disposition for the faithful (Minois, 1999: p. 26). The interpretation of Jesus’ death as a suicide was a stain on the garments of early Christianity (Minois, 1999: pp. 24–28), particularly as it related to associations of Jesus’ death as a βιοθανής (Robert, 1994: pp. 84–85). This was a problem for Pionios (Mart. Pionnii 13.3–7), e.g. in his defense of Jesus’ death (Ameling, 2008; Gibson, 2001; Zwierlein, 2014; Robert, 1994; cf. Schäfer, 2007).Thomas Aquinas acknowledged that Jesus’ death was taken on his own accord but argued against its imitation (Summa Theologiæ 47.1; Appendix 3). In contrast, John Donne, in his haunting posthumously published Biathanatos, defended suicide precisely along the lines of imitation (cf. Michael Hecht, 2013: pp. 45, 47–49, 55, 85, 107, 130, 231). The remarkably rich, varied, and multiple history of valuations of voluntary death within early Christianity reflect an instability within its founding event. ‘Christianity’s founding event was a suicide’ (Minois, 1999: p. 26). And this would forever induce some measure of discomfort.

5  Adieu – Death shocks life into an awareness of its inability to grasp itself. And voluntary death especially exacerbates the uncanny space between body and life (cf. Brown, 2008). Bowersock suggested that early histories of pre-Constantinian martyr acts ‘are precious remnants of a lost world’ (Bowersock, 1995: p. 39). And, though lost, this world has not been irrelevant. Jesus’ death as a suicide was revived in the age of the philosophes as a means of shaming the church’s authority (Minois, 1999: p. 215). In response to Holbach and others, Abbé Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier claimed Jesus’ death was no suicide but a sacrifice (Minois, 1999: p. 215). This ecclesial move was hardly novel. It reflects Origen’s re-valuation of an embarrassing admission: Jesus’ suicide was somehow divinely effective and sanctioned. Or, as Augustine would put it with respect to Samson, he had received some special revelation which made the act sacrosanct or somehow beneficial for others. 236

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The ranging valuations of suicide throughout the histories of Christianity reflect wider ambiguities and uncertainties of bodies in general.We are not quite sure what bodies are – where they begin and end; what they can do and for what they can be held accountable. In earlier periods we now flatter ourselves in deriding, debates on the right to a voluntary death reveal tensions on the ownership of bodies. The Council of Arles (452 ce), for example, viewed the suicide of a slave as a theft of the master. It was therefore an act of revolt, an affront on the health of the polis, and a deed ‘filled with diabolical fury’ (Minois, 1999: p. 30). During the French Revolution, suicide was raised as the supreme weapon of individual liberty. The Republic – in reaction to such defiance – raised disobedient corpses for sentencing and trial, and, of course, postmortem execution by its defining symbol of justice: the guillotine (Minois, 1999: pp. 302–304). Holding life in horror, as Adam Lux phrased it in the eighteenth century (Minois, 1999: pp. 302–304), or ‘divesting’ oneself of all the ‘affections of this carcass,’ as Clement of Alexandria commented in the third century (Strom. V.4), necessitates fanatic rhetorical responses and strange burial practices. The dead can do so much precisely because of the uncanny power of death and the ambiguity of the body (Bartlett, 2013). And, moreover, when the prevailing figuration of death is fractured, a rush of social instability inevitably follows (Michael Hecht, 2013: pp. 116–174). Despite the seemingly foreign feel of such beliefs and practices to our contemporary sensibilities, the worm in man’s heart still turns (Camus, 1969: p. 5). Currently we see fewer political suicides or what would have historically counted as voluntary martyrdom. Instead we witness the sad exits of those weary of life or imbalanced to its effective rhythms. Amidst the continual mutation which values are undergoing, Georges Minois concludes his masterful study on the History of Suicide by asking whether or not contemporary debates on bioethics should also ‘work to create a thanato-ethics’ (1999: p. 329). Though the balance of contemporary suicide might be weighted slightly different today than it was in the documented past, it still serves us well to question our censures and obsession with prevention, and ask instead what it is about our current moment that allows for the remainder of this antique desire for death. Key words: suicide, voluntary death, voluntary martyrdom, Augustine, Ignatius, Early Christianity, death of Jesus, body

Notes * For Benjamin Forrest Thate – in memoriam. 1 Or is he? Elsewhere Augustine can suggest it is better to starve than sup upon the food sacrificed to idols and that bishops should not flee persecution (see works cited in Minois, 1999: p. 331 n. 8). 2 Mart. Lugdun 29. Cf. the scene in the final act of Germanicus (Mart. Polycarpi 3.1) as well as the Martyrdom of Perpetua. See, too, the story of the six young men desiring death at the festival in Eusebius’ Martyrs of Palestine (M.P. 3.2–4). Cf., too, similar tropes in The Acts of the Pagan Martyrs. 3 The verse reads: βασκανία ἐν ὑμῖν μὴ κατοικείτω μηδ᾽ ἂν ἐγὼ παρὼν παρακαλῶ ὑμᾶς πείσθητέ μοι τούτοις δὲ μᾶλλον πείσθητε οἷς γράφω ὑμῖν ζῶν γὰρ γράφω ὑμῖν ἐρῶν τοῦ ἀποθανεῖν ὁ ἐμὸς ἔρως ἐσταύρωται καὶ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐν ἐμοὶ πῦρ φιλόϋλον ὕδωρ δὲ ζῶν καὶ λαλοῦν ἐν ἐμοί ἔσωθέν μοι λέγον Δεῦρο πρὸς τὸν πατέρα.

Further Reading De Ste Croix, G. E. M. (2006) Christian Persecution, Martyrdom, and Orthodoxy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The collection of de Ste Croix’s essays in this volume on the subject of martyrdom in general is invaluable. It sketches an important picture of the complex histories and ideologies of ‘martyrdom’ within which the suicide/voluntary martyr must be read.

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Michael J. Thate Minois, G. (1999) History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture. Translated by L. G. Cochrane. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Minois is a brilliant guide to the sordid histories of suicide within the West. He offers a longue durée which helpfully and boldly draws connections across cultures and times. Durkheim, É. (2007) On Suicide. Translated by R. Russ. New York: Penguin. Durkheim provides an indispensable classic in the history of understanding suicide as a social phenomenon. He is everywhere criticized and altered in subsequent literature. Nevertheless, everyone operates within his strong center of gravity. Bowersock, G. W. (1995) Martyrdom and Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bowersock is an absolute master of the period of late antiquity. His chapter on voluntary martyrdom in this volume is a helpful guide to this perplexing topic.

Bibliography Alvarez, A. (1970) The Savage God: A Study of Suicide. New York: Random House. Ameling, W. (2008) ‘The Christian lapsi in Smyrna, 250 A.D. (“Martyrium Pionii” 12–14),’ Vigiliae Christianae, 62(2), pp. 133–160. Barnes, T. D. (1968) ‘Pre-Decian Acta Martyrum,’ Journal of Theological Studies, 10(2), pp. 509–531. Bartlett, R. (2013) Why Can the Dead do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Berardi, F. (2015) Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. New York:Verso. Bowersock, G. W. (1995) Martyrdom and Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, P. (2008) The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. 20th Edition. New York: Columbia University Press. Brown, P. (2015) The Ransom of the Soul. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brunt, P. A. (1979) ‘Marcus Aurelius and the Christians,’ in: Deroux, C. (ed). Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History 483–520. Latomus: Brussels. Bryant, C. D. (ed). (2003) Handbook of Death and Dying. London, Sage. Camus, A. (1969) The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Translated by J. O’Brien. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Chaunu, P. (1977) La mort à Paris: XVIe, XVIIe, et XVIII siè-cles. Paris: Fayard. Craig, L. A. (2014) ‘The History of Madness and Mental Illness in the Middle Ages: Directions and Questions,’ History Compass, 12(9), pp. 729–744. De Ste Croix, G. E. M. (2006) Christian Persecution, Martyrdom, and Orthodoxy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Donaldson, I. (1982) The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Duffy, J. (2011) Thresholds of Meaning: Passage, Ritual and Liminality in Contemporary French Narrative. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Durkheim, É. (2007) On Suicide. Translated by R. Russ. New York: Penguin. Foucault, M. (2006) History of Madness. Translated by J. Murphy and J. Khalfa. London: Routledge. Gates, B. (1988) Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gibson, E. L. (2001) ‘Jewish Antagonism or Christian Polemic: The Case of the Martyrdom of Pionius,’ Journal of Early Christian Studies, 9(3), pp. 339–358. Gutiérrez-Jones, C. (2015) Suicide and Contemporary Science Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hübner, R. M. (1997) ‘Thesen zur Echtheit und Datierung der sieben Briefe des Ignatius von Antiochen,’ Zeitschrift für antikes Christentum, 1, pp. 44–72. Lane Fox, R. (1988) Pagans and Christians. New York: HarperCollins. Lightfoot, J. B. (1889) The Apostolic Fathers. 2nd Edition. London: Palgrave MacMillan. Lightfoot, J. B. (2017) Ignatius’s Epistle to the Romans. Available from: www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/ ignatius-romans-lightfoot.html [Accessed 23 March 2017]. MacDonald, M. (1993) Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Marsh, I. (2010) Suicide: Foucault, History and Truth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Matthes, M. (2001) The Rape of Lucretia and the Founding of Republics: readings in Livy, Machiavelli, and Rousseau. University Park, PN: Pennsylvania State University Press. Michael Hecht, J. (2013) Stay: A History of Suicide and the Arguments Against It. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Suicide and early Christianity Minois, G. (1999) History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture. Translated by L. G. Cochrane. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Moss, C. R. (2012) ‘The Discourse of Voluntary Martyrdom: Ancient and Modern,’ Church History, 81(3), pp. 531–551. Origen (1993) Commentary on the Gospel According to John: Books 13–32. Translated by R. E. Heine. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Retterstøl, N. (1993) Suicide: A European Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robert, L. (1994) Le martyre de Pionios. Edited by G. W. Bowersock and C. P. Jones. Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks. Schäfer, P. (2007) Jesus in the Talmud. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schöllgen, G. (1998) ‘Die Ignatien als pseudepigraphisches Briefcorpus: Anmerkung zu den Thesen von Reinhard M. Hübner,’ Zeitschrift für antikes Christentum, 2, pp. 16–25. Strocchia, S. T. (2015) ‘Women on the Edge: Madness, Possession, and Suicide in Early Modern Convents,’ Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 45(1), pp. 53–77. Vogt, H. J. (1999) ‘Bemerkungen zur Echtheit der Ignatiusbriefe,’ Zeitschrift für antikes Christentum, 3, pp. 50–63. Vovelle, M. (1983) La mort et l’Occident: De 1200 a nos jours. Paris: Gallimard. Wyrwa, D. (1983) Die christliche Platonaneignung in den Stromateis des Clemens von Alaxandrien. Berlin: de Gruyter. Zwierlein, O. (2014) Die Urfassungen der Martyria Polycarpi et Pionii und das Corpus Polycarpianum. Berlin: de Gruyter.

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20 HOW NOT TO BECOME A GHOST Tales of female suicide martyrs in sixteenthcentury Vietnamese ‘transmissions of marvels’ (truyền kỳ) Cuong T. Mai 1 Introduction Ghosts haunt the living, make threats and accusations in dreams, and hide in the shadows of abandoned ruins and neglected tombs, seemingly always threatening to unleash even more death, disease, and disorder.They are spirits out of place.All cultures represent the dead. Different cultures infuse literary, oral, visual, and dramatic representations of the dead with seemingly infinite varieties of meaning and significance. All cultures represent the dead, but not all cultures are equally concerned with the dead to the same depth, breadth, and seriousness.The social, cultural, religious – even political – powers which a culture attributes to the dead are reflected in the seriousness with which it treats ghosts; that is, the range and depth of religious responses to not only the ordinary dead or the special dead, but the dead out of place, the dead which are restless, haunting, polluting, and dangerous. This chapter is a prolegomenon to a study of the religious responses to death, dying, and the dead in the premodern culture and society of Vietnam. It is not a comprehensive view of the longue durée or a study of a specific case of historical change.1 Rather, my scope here will be limited.This chapter examines literary representations of ghosts in one genre of late-medieval and early-modern Vietnamese texts, comparing stories about the ghosts of those who committed suicide to safeguard chastity and loyalty, against stories about the ghosts of those who died violent, untimely deaths and become malevolent and disruptive. My aim is to examine how premodern Vietnamese society and culture represented the nature of the relationship between the human and spirit worlds, the moral claims they have on each other, and the types of powers they have over each other.

2  Malevolent ghosts and suicide martyrs Let us consider two contrasting stories of ghosts taken from a sixteenth-century collection of ‘transmissions of marvels’ (truyền kỳ 傳奇) written in Classical Chinese by the Vietnamese Confucian official Nguyễn Tự 阮嶼 (1497 – ?).2 At Phong Châu3 there was a man named Kỳ Vọng 期望, surnamed Hồ 胡. At the end of the Hồ Dynasty he went on business to the town of Xương Giang 昌江, 240

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where he became ill and died. His wife was too poor to have his corpse returned to be buried so she sold her young daughter, named Thị Nghi, to a rich merchant surnamed Phạm. When she grew up the girl was quite pretty and Phạm became fond of her. They had a secret affair. Phạm’s wife discovered it and used a pretext to beat Thị Nghi to death. Then she buried the body at the outskirts of the town. Several months later, Thị Nghi’s spirit rose up as a demon, appeared in myriad shapes, took the form of a woman who sold fermented beans, and possessed a young woman who sold wine.Village notables were struck down during illicit sex and the rich lost their wealth. Throughout the area people went out only in the afternoon and returned home before dusk.They warned each other about teasing pretty girls. After the villagers discovered that it was indeed the spirit of Thị Nghi that was causing the spectral calamities they dug up her grave and threw her bones into the river. From then on the disturbances mostly subsided.4 The narrator tells us that sometime later a man surnamed Hoàng 黃 was passing on the river when he heard the sounds of a young girl crying. He found the girl by the riverbank and inquired into her reasons. She explained that her parents had drowned in the river and that their bodies lay there. Hoàng offered her a boat ride back to the city and hired divers to retrieve the remains. Returning to the city, the remains were buried, with proper ritual care, by the river.The two eventually married and his friends and family were very much impressed with the young wife. However, after about a month Hoàng became sick with delirium. No doctor could cure him but some surmised that it was a case of demonic attack. One day a bedraggled person came and claimed to have a cure. He gave Hoàng a medicinal concoction, which made him vomit. Hoàng’s wife, Thị Nghi, became angry and said, ‘[w]hy do you come here to separate husband and wife, to divide this household?’5 The man then threw a talisman at her. She collapsed and turned into a pile of bones. He then had the grave by the river exhumed and there were no bones, just some droplets of blood.6 The story of the licentious ghost and her deceived husband continues and I will return to it below, but for now it will suffice to compare this episode with another tale from the same sixteenth-century collection. In this second story we learn of the tragic and violent death of another young woman, named Nguyễn Lệ Nương 阮麗娘.7 She and a young man named Lý Phật Sinh 李佛生 were betrothed by their parents before birth. Growing up they became kindred spirits, enjoyed reading and writing poetry together, and comported themselves as if they were already husband and wife though they were not yet married. In 1399 during the Hồ Dynasty, at the outbreak of the Trần Khát Chân affair, Lệ Nương was confined to the palace.8 One day, Phật Sinh received a letter from Lệ Nương telling of her desperate circumstances and urging him to give up on their past bonds and marry another. Greatly distressed but still attached to Lệ Nương, he refused to marry another. Later, at the downfall of the Hồ Dynasty and the invasion of the Ming, Phật Sinh surmised that Lệ Nương would have abandoned the palace, so he resolved to find her. He heard that the invader Lã Nghị captured some hundred maidens and was holding them at Thiên Trường. Phật Sinh believed that Lệ Nương was among the maidens and he requested troops to attack Lã Nghị. King Trần Giản Định 陳簡定 (r. 1407–1409) gave him five hundred soldiers. Phật Sinh inspired his troops and they advanced against Lã Nghị and his men, who then retreated to Xương Giang, then to Bắc Nga. However, Phật Sinh received orders to withdraw because the Chinese troops began retreating. At Bắc Nga he searched for Lệ Nương and came upon an old lady who said that she recognized the person Phật Sinh was looking for, but told him that Lệ Nương was already dead. She 241

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committed suicide along with two female companions. The old lady told Phật Sinh what happened just several days earlier: Five days ago when the Chinese troops were retreating there was a woman surnamed ̣ Nguyễn who addressed two others, one surnamed Chu and the other surnamed Trinh, saying “We are but weak and thin willows, our fate as fine as powder. Our country and home have been destroyed and we have drifted to this place. If we stay with them and leave we go into a foreign land. It is better to die here, in our homeland, than to become wandering spirits in the northern dominion.” They then committed suicide. The Chinese general pitied their (act of) chastity, and there in the mountain forest allowed them funeral rites.9 The old lady then led Phật Sinh to three grave mounds, where that night he slept. Grief stricken he said, ‘[i]t was for you that I searched for so long up to today, would that you could come to me in a dream to give some comfort.’10 Indeed, at the third watch of the night Lệ Nương appeared, they lovingly conversed as in olden days, and after the cock crowed thrice they had to part ways. He offered to take her remains back but she insisted on staying with her companions. Later Phật Sinh spent a sum of cash to rebuild all three tombs.The following night the three came to thank him, and just as he was conversing with them, they disappeared. He then returned home and never remarried. These two tales of violent deaths suffered by young women share similarities but also display telling differences. Both suffer unjust and violent deaths: Thi ̣ Nghi at the hands of a jealous mistress and Lệ Nương at her own hands after being captured by invaders and seeing no other resort. As young, unmarried women both are marginalized within their own social setting (though clearly Lệ Nương is markedly of higher status and power than Thi ̣ Nghi). Importantly, after death both corpses are placed outside the boundaries of the home. Thi ̣Nghi is first buried outside the village and then her corpse is exhumed and flung into the river, to drift forever without a home. Lệ Nương’s corpse remains in a zone betwixt and between, neither in the foreign land of her captors nor in the land of her family. Indeed, they share the common fate of an untimely, violent, and unjust death, their spirits lacking even a place to call home. However, their eventual after-death fates could not differ more markedly. Thi ̣ Nghi becomes a licentious ghost, seduces an unsuspecting victim and nearly causes his death, only to be discovered and then exorcised and destroyed. Lệ Nương’s suicide is celebrated even by her captors, and she is given a proper ceremony and a proper tomb, as well as unending loyalty from her betrothed, who never marries another. By way of introduction we have taken a cursory glance at only two illustrative stories and yet we already see the potential insights that can be gained. The nature and moral tone of the continuing bond between the living and the dead depend on many factors. What were the circumstances of death? Was it just or unjust? What was the state of mind of the deceased at death? What is the location and ritual status of the remains of the dead? Were their corpses properly buried and do they continue to receive care from the living? All the dead are types of spirits, but spirits are not all equal with regards to their moral nature, the powers that they have over the living, and the moral claims they can make. Magic powers and knowledge about the future can be elicited from the dead. The dead can bind families over time and space; the dead can divide communities and bring famine as well as illness. The dead occupy specific spaces and make demands at specific times. Disasters, accidents, sudden death, even a sudden turn in fortune – these can all be attributed to a restless local spirit or a dissatisfied ancestor. Thus stories about the dead, what we would call ‘ghost stories,’ were told and retold in 242

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traditional Vietnam – not merely because they were entertaining or horrifying, though certainly they were, but also because in the telling and the retelling, in the writing and rewriting, the stories came to reproduce and reinforce shared assumptions about space and time, the very shape of the cosmos, and the moral bonds binding the living to each other and to the dead.

3  Dimensions and realms It is written that at the cremation of the third emperor of the Trần Dynasty, Trần Nhân Tông, a relic fragment flew into the sleeves of a grandchild whom the deceased emperor had selected to be the imperial heir over the next in line. This event was recorded as a numinous marvel.11 Setting aside the political intent of the narrative, it is noteworthy that the incident is depicted not as a ghostly haunting but as a propitious communication from a recently deceased ancestor making his very specific intentions known. What is the difference between a ghostly haunting and an auspicious sign from the dead? Why does one inspire fear whereas the other inspires reverence? Indeed, what is the difference between the spirit of the ghost and that of the ancestor? All people die; all will become spirits. Most people pass on without incident, ensconced for some generations on the family or clan altar, invoked on appropriate death-day memorials, family ceremonies, new year rites, then slowly, imperceptibly forgotten and absorbed into the generic category of ‘ancestor’ (tổ tiên 祖先, or gia tiên). Other spirits get remembered by villagers as local worthies, some are memorialized by district officials as minor deities, very few become recognized by the state as national deities, and still others become noisome local ghosts or even powerful demons. Thus, everyone will become a spirit; most people will become ancestors, if they have progeny to ritually care for them after death. Some will become ghosts, if they suffer traumatic, violent, unjust, and sudden deaths away from home. A few will become local deities, if their numinous powers prove efficacious. Even fewer still can get rewarded with a position in the otherworld bureaucracies. Ancestors, ghosts, (some) demons, and (some) deities are former humans, transformed through death. They are all different types of spirits that share the world with humans, though they reside in a parallel dimension, just on the other side of this one. Whereas humans reside in the visible dimension, spirits occupy the dimension of the invisible.12 Nevertheless, the two dimensions constitute one world, not two, and there is a continuity of being across the dimensions, not a categorical difference of being, for example, between spirit and matter, or soul and body. The Vietnamese worldview divides the single world into three realms: the heavens, the earth, and the underworld. Each of these three realms contains both the visible and invisible dimensions coexisting together.The visible dimension of the heavens (stars and celestial bodies), the visible dimension of the earth (great trees, mountains, and rivers), and the visible dimension of the underworld (tombs, pits, and subterranean passageways) correlate respectively to the invisible dimension of the heavens (the celestial bureaucracy), the invisible dimension of the earth (the spirits of trees, mountains, and rivers), and the invisible dimension of the underworld (the abode of the dead).13 In this sense, an ancestral spirit that remains in place, but crosses dimensions momentarily to communicate to the living is not nearly as threatening as a ghost that remains in the earthly realm and frequently crosses dimensions. Robert Campany has noted how ancestors in early medieval Chinese culture are usually not featured in zhiguai stories, unless things go awry (1991: p. 32). Very much could be said about the Vietnamese view of ancestors. Hue Tam Ho Tai has remarked, ‘[i]f properly buried and worshiped, the dead would be happy to remain in their realms and act as benevolent spirits for their progeny’ (1985: p. 117). Indeed, ancestors, or the recently deceased, do not commonly cross dimensions to communicate to the living, unless the 243

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living initiate communication through some form of ritual mediation, using spirit medium-ship or divination, for example.14 The seventeenth-century dictionary Explanations of the Compass of Jewel Sounds, 15 under the chapter entitled ‘Requiting filial (debt) and sacrificial instruments,’ describes divination blocks, saying, ‘(When) the yin (side) and the yang (side) sit facing up by turns (the answer becomes) clear!’16 Such blocks could be used in deity temples or at ancestral altars to communicate with the dead. Usually, the questions are terse and simple, requiring only ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers.17 In contrast, ghosts give rise to disturbances in the earthly, visible realms but they lack a place, they are not rooted to a realm – but are still powerful, manifesting all kinds of visible signs. Ghosts are fundamentally spirits out of place, dislocated from their proper underworld realm, and therefore dangerous and disruptive.

4  The disruptive dead: ghosts as spirits out of place Let us return to one of the two initial stories which began the chapter, the tale of Thi ̣ Nghi. A wife discovers her husband’s affair with a servant girl, beats her to death, and buries her on the outskirts of the village. After a series of hauntings, possessions, inexplicable deaths, and calamities, the villagers exhume her corpse and throw it into a river. The spirit of Thi ̣ Nghi then seduces Hoàng, they marry, he becomes possessed with delirium, and an itinerant religious specialist discovers the spirit’s ruse and destroys her with a talisman. In this story, the ghost of Thi ̣ Nghi is many things: unfulfilled, frustrated, angry, malevolent, and a seductress. But above all, she is a spirit that needs a place, a spirit seeking a home. It is significant that her ghostly status is bound up with the shifting and ambiguous state and location of her corpse. She is murdered then buried – one presumes without proper rites – on the outskirts of the community. Then her corpse is exhumed and thrown into a river, to drift without a home.Then it is retrieved with the help of Hoàng and properly buried. Once her own bones are settled, taken out of the river, she seeks a husband and a home. Thus, the ghost of Thị Nghi is not primarily the stock phantom femme-fatale character, an insatiable sexual vampire seeking ‘love relations across the divide,’ as Robert Campany has phrased it (1991: p. 30).18 She is above all, the spirit of an unfulfilled young women who died an untimely death, before she could be married, before she could find a place in the world to call home. The river is a state of drifting homelessness. It is the placelessness which sums up – literally and symbolically – the fate of the ghost. In another tale, a young merchant named Trình Trung Ngộ 程忠遇 goes on business to the village of Nam Xương 南昌, where he meets a beautiful maiden named Nhị Khanh 蘂卿.19 The two quickly fall deeply in love. She says that both her parents are deceased and she had been cast out by her husband. Seducing him, she says that life is fleeting like a dream and that, ‘even if people of the Yellow Springs want to seek the pleasure of love, they can no longer get it’ (Nguyen, 2005: p. 509). She entices him onto a boat; they exchange poems and spend the night consummating their love. This continues for about a month, when Trung Ngộ is confronted by a friend who chastises him for carrying on with someone of dubious background and social standing: calamity will certainly ensue. After several requests, Nhị Khanh finally allows Trung Ngộ to visit her home. One night he enters, smells the stench of rotting flesh, and finds a coffin. He runs off, but she catches his sleeve, which rips. He escapes. Thereafter he is sick and delirious. She frequently visits him in the night, whispering to him. Finally, villagers find him dead, his corpse embracing her coffin. He is buried with her but the two spirits come to terrorize the villagers with hauntings and calamity, demanding rituals and sacrificial offerings. The villagers dig up their coffins and throw the corpses into the river. However, by the river there is an old

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temple with a great gạo (kapok) tree.The two ghosts enter the tree and continue to terrorize the villagers. The long tale ends when a wandering ritual specialist finally exorcises the licentious ghosts by invoking charms which call upon a host of spirit troops, who chain the spirits and drag them off to the celestial court to be punished. While it is important to recognize how Confucian ideology is infused into the story, for our purposes let us focus on how the representation of the fate of the ghost and her human lover go hand in hand with representations of their structural relationship to the social, natural, and cosmic landscape.20 It is significant that with each twist and turn of their illicit passion – from beginning, consummation, trials, and conclusion – there is a corresponding change in the placement of their bodies, corpses, and spirits, especially in relation to the river and the gạo tree.They first meet by the river. Trung Ngộ is a traveling merchant, and Nhị Khanh has neither home nor past. She tells him that both parents are dead and she has been cast out by her husband. She entices him by saying that life is fleeting, death soon catches up, and if the living wait to seek love and passion it will be too late. Of course, she speaks about her own predicament when she says that when dead people ‘seek the pleasure of love, they can no longer get it.’Then, they consummate their love on a boat, floating on the river. Here the river at once serves as the place of their illicit meeting and passionate tryst and also the symbolic representation of their dislocation from society, their rejection of social norms, and their common fate as drifters. One is a ghost without a home and the other is a river merchant floating place to place. Later, Trung Ngộ falls into a delirium, sick with love and possessed by a perverted love. He dies; they become lovers in death, two licentious ghosts. They wreak havoc, causing calamities and demanding sacrificial offerings. Finally, villagers dig up their coffins and throw their corpses in a river. Thus, the two spirits are expelled from society when the villagers forcibly remove them from a settled place – the grave – and deposit them into a non-place, the river, forcing them to drift forever without a ̣ whose angry spirit also wreaked home.This was the same fate of the corpse of the girl Thi Nghi, havoc on local villagers. The corpses of the lovers drift by a large gạo tree (mộc miên thụ 木棉樹, kapok tree),21 into which they take up residence. Gạo trees can grow to be large and imposing, their canopies harboring cavernous shadows, their leaves whispering and soughing at night, like the groans of ghosts. It is also no coincidence that the large massive tree is the direct opposite of the flowing river, for it is rooted and bound to a place. It becomes something like a home for the two spirits.22 However, unlike the ghost of Thi ̣ Nghi, who sought a home and a family, what these two ghosts seek is not primarily a home, but any stable place where they can indulge their passions, for once lodged in the tree they continue their licentious ways. In the tales above, the river serves as the repository into which corpses of disruptive spirits are deposited and the place where dissolute people and spirits meet to indulge in illicit conduct, outside the conventions of fixed social mores. The imagery of the river communicates a set of complex associations with deep emotional resonance: it invokes the sadness, loneliness, anxiety, and fear of being homeless, the state of having no kith and kin, having no root, and being powerless before the constantly buffeting waves and storms of life. Waters that never cease flowing can never hold roots. A person without roots is one without a fixed reference point of place and time, a person condemned to wander, with no past, no future, subject to others, without the protection and nurture of kith nor kin. Let us recall the story of Thi ̣ Nghi: the first thing that the spirit of Thi ̣ Nghi does when she meets Hoàng is she deceives him into thinking that she cries over her parents’ bones in the river, so that he will retrieve them and help her give them proper burial, when in fact, they are her own. Many Vietnamese and Chinese stories about spectral hauntings tell of how ghosts of the drowned linger at river banks, pulling in unsuspecting

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victims (Hungtington, 2005). However, rivers terrify also because they invoke another type of fear, not just the fear of being killed by it but also the fear of becoming like it: a drifting, homeless ghost, one that wanders endlessly and without purpose. Rivers are placeless places, just as ghosts are spirits out of place, spirits without a home. I do not want to reduce the complex and rich cultural, social, and religious meanings and functions of representations of ghostly existence to merely the fear of homelessness – this would be much too simplistic. A mere cursory reading of stories about both malevolent and benign spirits easily shows the sheer variety in which ghosts are represented and defined. There are many factors which contribute to the nature of a ghost: where they died, how they died, why they died, and what killed them. A death by drowning may lead to a variety of postmortem fates depending upon whether one died by suicide or accident, whether in a river or a well. A death by suicide could stem from thwarted love or attempts to protect one’s chastity. A death away from home while on the road could be due to sudden illness or murder by robbers. Mass deaths could result from war and wandering bandits, famine, harsh corvée labor, or plagues. Đỗ Thiện provides a vivid description, ‘[s]ometimes these forsaken souls join forces, forming an army of demonic spirits to devastate a whole countryside, and people can hear them fly in hordes through the air, calling out to each other, designating their victims’ (2007: p. 162). Each of these scenarios could lead to dramatically different outcomes for the spirit of the deceased. Then there are ghosts of those who died young and unmarried like Thị Nghi, lust-riven ghosts like Nhị Khanh, ghosts of those who die in childbirth, and ghosts of mothers with young children. Thus, there are many kinds of representations of ghosts, each type serving different social, cultural, religious – even literary or poetic – functions. Nevertheless, amidst this sheer variety of ghosts, there is a common condition: a state of dislocation, of homelessness. To be homeless, however, is more than a state of dislocation – it is to lack a family, the security of the group, its life-giving nurture, support, and protection. It is to be powerless, directionless, and meaningless. It is to be uprooted from the past, and to have no future. How the prospect of such a state is especially anxiety-inducing can be best understood when one understands the importance and centrality of family religion in traditional culture and society. Jonathan Z. Smith, Stanley Stowers, and others have defined family religion, broadly speaking, as consisting of the cults and practices which invoke various deities and ancestors in order to ensure the family’s continuity, memory, and rootedness.23 When people die away from home or before establishing a household, for example, the ritual care of their spirits cannot be guaranteed in the cult of the dead at the center of family religion.24 After death one gains security, one is remembered, and one has a place in the world through and by means of the perpetuation of the rites for the family dead. In other words, a person without a family is as good as dead. To die without a family, or to die without the prospect of becoming an ancestor, is to die twice.There is then embedded in the imagery of the river a lingering fear of not only the ghosts of the drowned, but also the fear of becoming a ghost. It should be no surprise then that Nguyễn Du’s (1766–1820) requiem for wandering ghosts, or orphan spirits (hồn mồ côi) as he calls them, evokes through repetition images of homelessness and drifting, emphasizing how ghosts lack a place of warmth and sustenance, how they wander aimlessly and unprotected, in cold, damp, and dark woods and wastelands.25 Indeed, Nguyễn Du describes the world of the nameless, unmourned, wandering dead, comparing their world to a long, endless night which is pierced with screams and wailing, and made all the more unbearable by a shivering cold rain. The poet declares, ‘whose innards would not be gripped,’ at such a sight (lòng nào là chẳng thiết tha). Then he continues to invoke the gloomy evenings of autumn, comparing them to the endless night of the wandering dead, saying, ‘such is this world of light, 246

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how much more the world of shades’ (cõi dương còn thế nữa là cõi âm; Nguyễn, 1965: p. 11). Nguyễn Du continues, During this long night, in this darkened world, Would that they could manifest out of the gloom. How pitiful the myriad beings, Their lonesome souls adrift in a strange land, Without even a resting place for incense smoke. Trong trường dạ tối tăm trời đất, Có khôn thiêng phảng phất u minh, Thương thay thập loại chúng sinh, Hồn đơn phách chiếc lênh đênh quê người. Hương khói đã không nơi nương tựa Nguyen, ̃ 1965: p. 11 The remainder of Nguyễn Du’s long poem invokes the senses of touch, smell, sound, and sight to weave together a series of opposing imageries: the world of light versus the world of darkness, the warmth of the home fire versus the shivering cold of the dark woods, being rooted versus drifting (lênh đênh) and wandering, being fed and sustained versus being afflicted by constant hunger, being remembered and known versus being unknown and forgotten. Central to these contrasting images and sensations is the opposition of having a home and being homeless. The ‘lonesome souls adrift in a strange land,’ ‘has no incense smoke’ and ‘has no one from whom to take even a cup of water or candle light or incense’ (Nguyẽn, 1965: pp. 11, 13). The homeless dead is one who has no home on the ancestral altar, who does not receive proper rites, and who has no family as support.26 That which has neither home nor family has no anchor. That which is unanchored drifts (lênh đênh) like a river.27

5  Special dead: suicide martyrs According to the definitions proposed above, the ordinary dead do not cross dimensions or cross realms.They remain in place and invisible, settled in the world below. Like most ancestral spirits, they are memorialized for a time through family religion, then with the passing of the generations they slowly fade from living memory. By contrast, the special dead are those who can cross dimensions and realms, in some combination thereof. The special dead are powerful, but they are not ghosts. Among the many types of special dead, the suicide martyr is especially interesting for our purposes because the suicide is normally the most likely to become a fearsome ghost. However, the martyr suicide does not become a ghost. Rather the martyr becomes a powerful spirit, worthy of ritual, remembrance, and reverence. What is the difference between the martyr suicide who becomes a special dead and the regular suicide that becomes a mere ghost? The social, literary, and political phenomenon of the cult of female suicide martyrs in late imperial China has been well-studied, specifically cases of the idolization and idealization of women who commit suicide to safeguard ‘feminine’ Confucian virtues such as chastity and loyalty. Such suicide martyrs became the focus of cultic worship; they were seen as a special class of exemplary (lie 列) dead, rather than ghosts.28 Some scholars, such as Sherry Mou, see this as the male co-opting of the life and death of marginalized women (2004). Other scholars, 247

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such as Janet Theiss and Paola Zamperini, argue that late imperial Chinese literature represented ‘women’s suicide as a passionate act of self-assertion, and not as a defeat in the face of adversities, a response to abuse suffered, or a last resort to preserve chastity’ (Zamperini, 2001: p. 78; Theiss, 2005). For the Vietnamese cases discussed here it is clear that a woman’s ‘passionate act of self-assertion’ could nevertheless have been performed under subjugation and physical duress.29 Let us recall the tale of Lệ Nương, who committed suicide with two companions while captive to the northern invaders. Seeking to convince her companions she says, Our country and home have been destroyed and we have drifted to this place. If we stay with them and leave we go into a foreign land. It is better to die here, in our homeland, than to become wandering spirits in the northern dominion. The narrator then tells us that the three suicides received proper burial rites even from their captors and their tombs received special care from Phật Sinh, who was later personally thanked by the spirits. In short, through the suicide the three women could ensure a proper place for themselves in their own land, increasing the likelihood that they would not become ‘lonesome spirits’ (cô hồn). The narrator, perhaps a bit heavy-handedly, tells us that ‘[t]he Chinese general pitied their (act of) chastity and there in the mountain forest allowed them funeral rites.’ Indeed, rather than ‘pity,’ it may very well have been the case that the Chinese soldiers feared the pollution and danger that the outraged spirits could inflict on them. In any case, the tale effectively says, through this act the women who no longer had any recourse could claim for themselves agency, virtue, and power, and could demand for themselves ritual care after death.Thus, rather than become suicide ghosts – which the Chinese invaders would also have feared – they became suicide martyrs. Setting aside for the moment the actual motivation of the historical Lệ Nương, if ever such a person existed, it is clear that the narrator’s representation of the suicide follows a cultural logic which already presumes what a legitimate suicide would consist of and what reward should follow: death for the protection of the female virtues of chastity and loyalty overrides the horror of self-inflicted death and commands respect and due ritual care, even from one’s enemies. This ritual care, moreover, prevents the spirit of the suicide from becoming a ‘lonesome spirit’ destined to wander aimlessly in perpetuity without a home, without sustenance, and without being remembered. This cultural logic of virtuous suicide, which turns the potential ghost into a kind of ‘martyr for virtue,’ is found prominently in two other tales in Nguyễn Tự’s Transmissions of Marvels Casually Collected: the tales of ‘The Righteous Wife of Khoái Châu’ and ‘The Girl from Nam Xương.’30 The tale of ‘The Righteous Wife of Khoái Châu’ begins with the young man Trọng Qùy and the young woman Nhị Khanh 蘂卿, who are both betrothed by their fathers. The two embody stock characters in the typical ‘scholar-beauty’ (tài tử giai nhân) romance: they are a perfect match, handsome and beautiful, talented in poetry and well-read, deeply bound by true feelings.31 Unfortunately, Trọng Qùy and his father are called to serve the government in a distant province to quell an uprising. In light of the dangers, Nhị Khanh is told to remain behind and wait for later reunion with her husband. But,Trọng Qùy hesitates and it is Nhị Khanh who chastises him and says that she will not let ‘feminine feelings’ (khuê tình閨情) obstruct ‘the way of filial duty’ (hiếu đạo; Ngô, 2008: p. 123). This first episode prefigures the main tension of the tale, the conflict between duty and passions (nghĩa vs tình). At each moment of conflict, it is the wife Nhị Khanh who triumphs and her husband who fails. Later, while Trọng Qùy is away Nhị Khanh’s parents die, she returns home to perform the necessary mourning rites, then lives with her aunt Ms. Lưu.With some six years having passed since Trọng Qùy’s departure a high-ranking military officer surnamed Bạch proposes marriage to Nhị Khanh and Ms. Lưu agrees, urging 248

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the resistant Nhị Khanh. By this point in the story, the narrator has made clear: Nhị Khanh is a beautiful, learned, dutiful, filial, and loyal wife, without blemish. Pressed by Ms. Lưu and Bạch, Nhị Khanh desperately sends a servant to search for Trọng Qùy, who is found impoverished. The scene of their reunion is heartrending, the narrator again emphasizing their true emotional harmony, the fact that their passionate bonds are predestined (duyên). Indeed, the more the narrator emphasizes this destined love, the darker the tragedy which will conclude the tale. For the final time, evil circumstances intervene. Trọng Qùy meets the merchant Đỗ Tam, who lusts after Nhị Khanh. Trọng Qùy covets Đỗ Tam’s money and his old profligate ways return, especially since in their gambling Đỗ Tam lets Trọng Qùy win easily. Nhị Khanh warns her husband about this suspicious friend. However, his pride and greed already much inflated,Trọng Qùy is urged on by Đỗ Tam to bet his wife for a large sum of gold. He loses then informs Nhị Khanh of her tragic fate, even urging her to be compliant towards her new husband. She agrees, as a dutiful wife must. However, this is a ruse. She embraces her children in a final parting, saying, ‘[y]our father is unfaithful and cannot be relied on. Separation is a fact of life and death is nothing to me. I just think of you (my children).’32 She then hangs herself with a silk rope. At long last,Trọng Qùy realizes his error and with great regret chants a long, mournful prayer (văn tế) for the spirit of his wife.33 Reduced to a hard and desperate existence, he seeks help from a friend in Quy Hóa and along the way stops to rest. He falls asleep, and hears a voice saying, ‘[i] s this you, Sir Phùng? If you still have your former affection (for me), we can meet on a (certain day of a certain month) at the threshold of the Trưng Vương Temple. Even the Realm of Shades (u minh 幽冥) cannot separate a deep affection (ân tình 恩情).’34 He opens his eyes and sees a cluster of dark clouds drifting to the northwest.Though quite suspicious he nevertheless goes to the Trưng Vương Temple. On arriving at the place at the appointed day he sees not a soul. He hears only the lonesome cawing of some crows. He lays down to rest and around the third watch of the night he hears from afar the sound of crying. Finally Nhị Khanh appears, weeping. She thanks him for coming from such a distance, then Trọng Qùy inquires into what had transpired since her death. She replies, After I left, the Thearch on High (Thượng Đế) felt pity for my unjust fate and blessed me with his grace. Now I serve at this temple, busily looking after the memorials sent up (to the celestial court), without any respite so that I can visit you. It was only because of that time I happened to have seen you resting (by the road), otherwise, even until the end of the age we would not meet again. . . . Just now I came here by way of the Imperial Cloud Chariots, on my way to the Thearch, and I requested a moment to see you. This is why I did not arrive at the appointed time.35 After talking of the past, Nhị Khanh talks about the present and future. She tells Trọng Qùy that serving in the celestial court of Her Eminence (Đức Bà) she frequently overhears the deities speak of terrestrial affairs. She has learned that the Hồ Dynasty will fall on the year of Bính Tuất丙戌, that there will be uprisings and hundreds of thousands will die, not to mention those who will be captured by bandits. At that time a Realized Man (chân nhân真人) surnamed Lê will rise up in the southwest. She urges Trọng Qùy to allow their sons to join this person. Then, just as dawn arose, Nhị Khanh quickly bade farewell, rushed away, turned to look back, and then vanished. The narrator then tells us that Trọng Qùy never remarried, his sons came to serve Lê Thái Tổ, and their descendants presently still reside in Khoái Châu. Read together, the tales of Lệ Nương and Nhị Khanh illustrate a cultural logic of female martyrdom. The narratives follow a similar four-step sequence. First, an injustice or tragic 249

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circumstance divides a family or a destined union of a husband and a wife, a talented scholar and a beautiful maiden. Second, the female protagonist commits suicide as a form of protest. She commits suicide as a last resort, willingly but not frivolously. This underscores the strength and sincerity of her virtue.Third, she receives proper funerary rites, perhaps her body is retrieved and properly buried. She therefore decidedly does not become a wandering, homeless, ‘lonesome spirit’ (cô hồn). Fourth, her spirit returns temporarily to the world of the living in some form, visible to a loved one in a dream or in waking life, to testify to some transformed state which indicates that she is precisely not a ghost. In some narratives during her return she provides some otherwise hidden information or moral wisdom. In light of this four-step sequence, we see that both Lệ Nương and Nhị Khanh are caught in tragic circumstances not of their own making. Both women commit suicide in protest, as a last resort, explicitly to uphold the female virtues of chastity and loyalty. Both women receive proper last rites. For Lệ Nương, the rites are provided by both her Chinese captors and her fiancée Phật Sinh. For Nhị Khanh, proper ritual care is quite strongly emphasized in the long, sad funeral prayer that Trọng Qùy composes. Finally, both women return temporarily, crossing realms, becoming visible for a time. Lệ Nương returns at night, crossing realms, twice – first to comfort Phật Sinh at her grave and second to give thanks and bid final farewell. Nhị Khanh crosses from the invisible to the visible dimensions the first time in Trọng Qùy’s dream by the roadside on the way to Quy Hóa. She does not appear; she is perceived only as a voice in a dream. Finally, at a sacred space, the threshold of Trưng Vương Temple, she crosses realms at night and appears in person to converse with Trọng Qùy. Moreover, she uncannily predicts events about to unfold, namely the imminent downfall of the Hồ Dynasty. This four-step sequence can also be found in the ‘Tale of the Young Woman from Nam Xương.’36 In this story a young woman named Vũ Thị Thiết 武氏設 from Nam Xương 南昌 was betrothed to a man named Trương 張. Shortly after marriage he was drafted into war. After three years he returns home, discovers that his mother had died but that she was served with great filial devotion by his wife. However, at his mother’s grave he learns from his son that while away his wife would be visited each night by another man who the boy was told to address as ‘daddy.’ This nightly visitor, according to the boy, never said a word to him nor embraced him, only walking, sitting, and moving when his mother did so. Trương, who was suspicious by nature, grew angry with Thị Thiết and berated her, accusing her of adultery. She denied the accusations, saying, Separated for three years, I kept my chastity completely intact. I abstained from using lip-color and face powder, and did not set foot in the paths of willows and flowers. How could there be any occasion in which I had engaged in fickle conduct as you said. Nguyen, 2005: pp. 554–555 Unable to endure the constant accusations and public humiliation,Thị Thiết resolved to commit suicide by throwing herself into the Hoàng Giang (Yellow River). Before doing so, she performs an abstention ritual and purifies herself, then declares to heaven, This ill-fated person has found herself in a lonely familial relationship: both her husband and her son bitterly hate her. I have unjustly suffered baseless accusations and have shamefully endured a reputation like a filthy head-dress. Omniscient river spirit, please by my witness. If I have sincerely conducted a moral life without hypocrisy, may I be turned into the pearl of Mỵ Nương after my drowning, or may I be turned into the grass of Yuji after my burial. If my favors are cast this way and that, or if my 250

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mind and heart first remain chaste and faithful to my husband, then later act wantonly, may I be turned into fodder for fish and freshwater turtles if in the water; or may I be turned into food for eagles and hawks if on land; may I also suffer insults as did He Jian. Nguyen, 2005: pp. 557–55837 After declaring thus, she throws herself into the river. Trương searches for her to no avail. He later learns from his son that the mysterious man was, in fact, the shadow of his wife, which she had said in jest was the boy’s ‘daddy.’ Jealousy blinded Trương to his wife’s innocence and made him besmirch her honor, with tragic results. The story then switches to a man named Phan 潘, who hailed from the same village as Thị Thiết. One night he dreams of a girl dressed in green who beseeches him to rescue her. The next morning a fisherman gives him a gift of a green-shelled turtle and recalling his dream, he decides to release it. Later, trying to escape political unrests he and others sail off the coast, but a storm arises, the boat is destroyed and all die, except Phan. He finds himself in a turtle cave on an island. Then the goddess Linh Phi appears. She explains that she was the green turtle that he had rescued earlier and now she would return the favor. She gives him gifts and a fine banquet, at which there are many beautiful serving maids. Phan notices one who looks like Thị Thiết, but he dares not look directly, much less say a word. Later, Thị Thiết recognizes Phan and explains what had happened after she threw herself into the river: Previously I was ill-fated and suffered insults as well as false accusations. Consequently I had to throw myself into the river. Having sympathy for me because of my innocence, the underwater goddesses opened up a channel in the water, thanks to which I was rescued from death. Otherwise I would have been buried in the stomachs of fish and other aquatic animals without now having the chance to encounter you here. Nguyen, 2005: pp. 560–561 Phan then tries to convince her to return but she still resents her unjust death. Finally, she relents and asks Phan to bring back a golden flower as proof to Trương. She says, Please tell my husband Trương that if he still has any of his old love for me, he could erect an expiatory purifying altar by the riverbank and light a divine lamp to illuminate the water, and I shall be there. Nguyen, 2005: p. 561 Phan returns and relates all of this to Trương, who refuses to believe it, until he is given the golden flower.Then he sets up an altar on the bank of the Hoàng Giang and makes offerings for three days and three nights.Thị Thiết appears out of the waters accompanied with a resplendent retinue and says to Trương, ‘Grateful to the goddess’s kindness, I have made a vow to serve her until my last breath. Many thanks to you, my beloved, but I can no longer stay in the world of humans’ (Nguyen, 2005: p. 563). She fades back into the waters and disappears. In terms of structure, the tale of Thị Thiết also consists of four steps: tragedy, suicide, transformation, and return. In terms of content,Thị Thiết’s bearing of false accusation from her husband resembles Nhị Khanh’s fate of being forced to become another man’s concubine. That is, both suffer injustice, but not immediate physical danger, as in the case of Lệ Nương. Rather, their common injustice is undeserved social humiliation and being driven from their homes. In both cases, the tragedy which instigates the suicides extends from the character defect of the husband: 251

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Trọng Qùy’s ‘true love’ for Nhị Khanh is undone by his profligacy and greed, whereas Trương’s ‘true love’ for Thị Thiết is undone by his blind jealousy. In such a tragic situation of undeserved and unbearable suffering, suicide becomes an act of protest, a declaration of innocence in the face of a false accusation. Thị Thiết’s story is especially illustrative of suicide as an act of protest in that it contains a telling episode not found in the Nhị Khanh or Lệ Nương stories, namely the declaration which Thị Thiết utters before throwing herself into the river. Before drowning herself, she invokes the ‘omniscient river spirit’ to be a ‘witness’ to her act, to do what human justice cannot or is unable to do. In effect, her declaration is a vow to accept the riverine spirit’s divine judgment of her suicide and the consequences which follow. Thus, if the suicide as an act of protest is a public condemnation of injustice, the invocation of the gods as witness is an exclamation mark. Indeed, Margery Wolf ’s observation on Chinese female suicide could also apply to the Vietnamese narratives discussed here. Wolf explains, suicide ‘is not only an individual act, a gesture of personal despair, but also an act that implicates others’ and ‘for a woman it is the most damning accusation she can make of her mother-in-law, her husband, and so on’ (1985: p. 12). Moreover, the invocation of the riverine spirit in particular is no coincidence for death by drowning, as we have discussed, is one of the surest ways of becoming a ghost. In the story of Thị Thiết the protagonist is an innocent victim of tragic circumstances but she chooses to die rather than live without a home and in humiliation. She chooses the time and place of her death. She chooses the judgment of the gods over that of man. She tempts the river god to turn her into ‘food for fish and turtle,’ which is precisely to lose bodily integrity to an extent that proper burial is impossible. In short, she tempts the riverine spirit to turn her into a ghost. Rather than become an angry, wandering ghost, she is rewarded by the riverine spirit with a position in the divine underwater court. The waters divide, a path appears, and she crosses over to an entirely different realm. Thị Thiết does not die, but neither is she any longer completely human, for she can no longer live in human society. Most importantly, she has escaped the ghostly fate of the suicide. Finally, in the fourth step of the narrative sequence, the spirit crosses realms and returns to testify to her redemption. Lệ Nương returns on two nights to talk to Phật Sinh. Nhị Khanh first crosses dimensions and is perceived as a voice in a dream, then she crosses realms at the Trưng Vương Temple, appearing in person to Trọng Qùy. Similarly, Thị Thiết cannot cross realms at first. Rather, by way of Phan she tells Trương to perform the expiatory rites by the river to facilitate her appearance. In all three stories, once the spirit of the suicide has been redeemed from a ghostly existence, received proper burial, or given rewards from the gods, they then have the power to cross realms at a predetermined, ritually marked-off space.38

6 Conclusion In this brief chapter I have examined how religion and culture defined and articulated the nature of the relationship between the living and the dead, the moral claims they have on each other, the types of powers they have over each other, and the shape of the cosmos such powers and bonds presume. We have compared literary representations of two types of spirits of the dead: the malevolent ghost and the ghost of the suicide.Though the two types of spirits differ in several respects, their differences rest on a shared conception of a tripartite world (heaven, earth, and underworld) divided into two dimensions, the visible and invisible. Ghosts are spirits out of place, unmoored to a realm, powerful and visible when they should be invisible and settled in the world below. By contrast, the spirit of the martyr suicide escapes the ghostly fate, is settled in place, is rooted to a specific realm, receives proper ritual care, and gains certain powers to cross 252

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dimensions and realms. The virtuous martyr represents suicide done right, self-inflicted death redeemed and rewarded. Indeed, select suicide martyrs can become domesticated, transformed into the special dead, anchored through ritual and temple worship and thus placed back into ever-widening social units (some ultimately attaining apotheosis as a local deity, a village deity, or even a national deity). The spirit of the suicide martyr can become one of many kinds of special dead, efficacious (linh ứng) but predictable, orderly, and tamed. We have seen that ghost stories, as stories, can certainly serve as entertainment, to elicit macabre fascination, or even satisfy a kind of literary sexual voyeurism. Mu-chou Poo has shown how early-medieval Chinese ghosts stories served as fantasies and imaginations of an ‘ideal world,’ for example (1997, 2000). Commenting on the role of ritual opera in Chinese popular religion, David Johnson has noted that the ‘distinction between entertainment and religion that comes naturally to us did not seem that obvious to most Chinese’ (1995: p. 91).39 The same, mutatis mutandis, can be said of Vietnam. Indeed, in traditional Vietnam ghost stories were also a part of a larger cultural reality wider in scope than literary fantasy, a culture which took the dead seriously, as real moral agents in the world. Moreover, ghost stories were integral to a larger sensorial mode of being in the world very much concerned with invisible spirits in general and the dead in particular.40 This shared culture of the ordinary, special, and disruptive dead not only included traditions of storytelling and story writing, but also traditions of religious specialists who offered expertise in quelling malevolent spirits and traditions of everyday practices centered at the ancestral altar. Moreover, in the background of these ghost narratives I detect certain discursive fault lines: place versus placelessness, rootedness versus wandering, memory versus forgetfulness, and home versus homelessness.41 These enduring discursive tensions at once structure, constrain, and make possible the imagination of the cosmos and the articulation of the social self. André Burguière, in commenting on the French annales school’s approach to studying the history of death in Western culture, describes how the view from the longue durée illuminates the processes by which, in imagining death and the afterlife, societies ‘endlessly shuffle the same cards . . . in order to obtain a new hand’ (2009: p. 189; McManners, 1981). Jacques Le Goff ’s narration of the medieval ‘birth of purgatory’ (after a ‘gestation’ of several centuries) too posits a long-held cultural concern with intermediate zones between heaven and hell, between absolute good and absolute evil (1984). Perhaps then these enduring discursive tensions in Vietnamese culture too functioned in a similar fashion: they were productive underlying structures which provided not only historical continuity and cultural unity, but also the very conditions for change through time and variation across space and communities. In Vietnamese ghost stories anxiety over homelessness, rootlessness, and severed connections with memory, place, and family seem more abiding, or at least of more immediate concern than any fear of ‘sin,’ afterlife punishment, or personal salvation.42 Viewed through Jonathan Z. Smith’s distinction between locative and utopian religions (1978), I consider strategies which negotiate these discursive fault lines in the realm of death as constituting a ‘locative’ approach to the cultural representation of the afterlife, mortality, and the dead. In other words, in such an approach numinous power accessed through rituals is used primarily to manage the dead, to put corpses in their proper places and spirits in their proper realms. As we have seen, the dead can be used to anchor the ancestral cult at the center of family religion in order to make a ‘dwelling’ (Tweed, 2006) for the living.The suicide martyr can be transformed, again through ritual, into a pacified representative of male-prescribed feminine virtues. In my understanding, making a dwelling in the cosmos in general and a household (within a community) in particular, from the locative standpoint, entails first of all ritualized acts of arrangement and placement, that is, (following Mary Douglas) acts of negotiating purity and pollution (1966). In the sphere of managing death 253

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this means ritually rooting the spirits (their memory and their material remains) in their proper realms and dimensions. For as Thomas Laqueur has shown, almost universally and throughout the longue durée (of Western history), the corpses of the dead have been made to do important ‘work’ for the living (2016). As I see it, in these Vietnamese stories, the ‘work’ performed by the dead involves primarily marking off boundaries and anchoring a home for the living within time and space, in relation to realms and dimensions, and ‘throughout the generations forever’ (Jay, 1992). Hence, the locative approach to the underlying cultural tensions focuses first on arranging the dead – both their corpses and their spirits – by means of ritual practices which manage purity and pollution; order gender, political, and moral hierarchies; and negotiate centers and peripheries. Thus, ghosts as spirits out of place are embedded – paradoxically – within the locative cosmos. Their place is to be out of place: there will always be the possibility of liminal beings in the locative approach to managing underlying discursive tensions. What will vary through time, across place, and in different communities is the kind of social, political, and religious ‘work’ representations of ghosts can serve (Schmitt, 1998; Poo, 2009), and also, the kinds of ritual powers and religious repertoires which can be invoked to manage spirits out of place or harness their powers (Davis, 2001; Poo, 2017; Campany, 2012a; McDaniel, 2014; Williams and Ladwig, 2012; Cuevas and Stone, 2007; Johnston, 2013). Understanding cultural representations of ghosts in this way I think has broad implications on how historians of social, cultural, and religious history can explain and interpret uniformity and diversity, stability and change, within the vast corpus of phenomena concerned with the afterlife, mortality, and the dead (Segal, 1989; Brown, 2015; Sourvinou-Inwood, 1995). Key words: suicide martyr, truyền kỳ,Vietnam, ghosts, disruptive dead

Notes 1 A comprehensive study of the importance of the dead in general and ghosts in particular within a specific culture would encompass sources from as wide a scope as possible, while simultaneously taking a wide view of the longue durée, punctuated with short excursions into more focused investigations of discrete moments of social, cultural, political, technological, or economic change. 2 Transmission of Marvels Casually Collected (Truyền Kỳ Mạn Lục 傳奇漫錄) by Nguyễn Tự. Translations are my own, unless noted otherwise. I have consulted the French translation by Nguyễn Trần Huân (1962), the Chinese text (Chan, Cheng and Trần, 1992), and the Vietnamese translation by Ngô Văn Triện (2008). The most extensive study of the Vietnamese ‘transmission of marvels’ genre in a Western language is Nam Nguyen’s dissertation (2005). While no single monograph in a Western language covers this rich genre of Vietnamese literature, various studies provide critical background information, such as (Kyung, 2006;Yan, 2013; Durand, 1997; Kornicki, 2017; Durand and Nguyen, 1985;Trần, 1997; Schneider, 1995). 3 Present-day Phú Thọ. 4 See Nam Nguyen’s brief discussion of this story (2005: pp. 420–422) and a comparison of some passages from the Peony Lantern (2005: pp. 359–361). 5 See Ngô (2008: p. 201), Chan et al. (1992, series 1, vol. 1: p. 250), and Nguyễn (1962: p. 158). 6 This narrative conforms to Anthony Yu’s description of the prototypical four-part structure of Chinese phantom-temptress stories. Such stories begin with a union with a temptress and include a cleric providing a warning, an intervention of magic power, and finally removal of the temptress (1987: p. 428). See also Cheung (1984–1985). 7 See Ngô (2008: p. 251–259), Chan et al. (1992, series 1, vol. 1: pp. 421–441), and Nguyễn (1962: pp. 227–235). 8 A reference to an assassination attempt by Trần Khát Chân 陳渴真 (1370–1399) and the resulting punishment meted out to him and his accomplices, and those related to them, including Lệ Nương,

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How not to become a ghost who was related on her maternal side (according to the narrator). See Nguyen (2005: pp. 403–406) and Taylor (2013: pp. 168–169). 9 See Ngô (2008: p. 257), Chan et al. (1992, series 1, vol. 1: p. 423), and Nguyễn (1962: p. 233). 10 See Ngô (2008: p. 257), Chan et al. (1992, series 1, vol. 1: p. 423), and Nguyễn (1962: p. 233). 11 This account of the spirit of the third emperor Trần Nhân Tông designating the fifth emperor (Trần Minh Tông, r. 1314–1329) appears in the fifteenth-century memoir entitled Dream Records of a Southern Man (Nam Ông Mộng Lục 南翁夢錄), by Hồ Nguyên Trừng (1374–1446), a Vietnamese official exiled in China after the Ming invasion of the early fifteenth century. For more on Hồ Nguyên Trừng, see especially Chapter 2 of Baldanza (2016). For the Quốc Ngữ text see Nguyễn and Hoa (2008: p. 72). I have consulted the Chinese text (Chan et al., 1992, series 1, vol. 6: p. 15). For a discussion of the critical editions and translations of this text, see Nguyễn (1998). Trần Nhân Tông is most famous for establishing the Truc Lam Zen tradition, on which see Nguyen (1997: pp. 20, 49, 50, 97, 341–342, 342–350). 12 The visible/invisible or seen/unseen distinction is also very important in Chinese religions. Scholarly writing on this is rich and numerous; see especially Stephen Teiser’s useful summary (1996) and also Campany (2012b) and Mu (2015). For a detailed discussion of late imperial Chinese narratives which depict crossings and communications between the seen and the unseen realms, see Zeitlin (1993: pp. 15–42) and Allen (2014). 13 Đinh Phan Cẩm Vân has noted that the Vietnamese transmission of marvels genre often features narratives about return from death, the dead becoming demons to exact revenge, humans consorting with immortals and ghosts, different perceptions of time, and a tripartite world ruled by celestial, water, and underworld bureaucracies (2000). For an overview of the traditional religious worldview of Vietnam, see Tai (1985), Condominas (1987), and Cadière (1955–1958). 14 The tale of ‘Phạm Công Cúc Hoa’ famously contains an episode in which the male protagonist Phạm Công descends into the underworld to rescue his love Cúc Hoa (Henry, 2001). For the Quốc Ngữ text, see Bùi (1965). 15 Chỉ Nam Ngọc Âm Giải Nghĩa. I have consulted Trần Xuân Ngọc Lan’s transcription into Quốc Ngử (1985) and a Sino-Nôm manuscript version (AB 372). On the history and compilation of this dictionary, see Nguyen (1995), Taylor (2011), and Phan (2014). 16 In chapter twenty-four, entitled Báo hiếu tế khí (報孝祭器）the definition for giao hoàn in Sino-Nôm is, ‘xin keo một lần. . . âm dương ấp ngửa bội phần minh thay’ ( . . . 陰陽立仰倍分明世). See Trần (1985: pp. 175). 17 Such divination is more commonly referred to in vernacular as xin keo (Sino-Vietnamese giao hoàn 珓 環, Chinese jiaobei 筊杯). For an explanation of the terminology of divination blocks, see Jordan (1972). 18 For a discussion of the femme-fatale theme in Vietnamese literature, see Henry (2001). 19 Nam Nguyen has translated the full text of the ‘Story of the Kapok Tree’ and has provided an extensive comparison with passages and episodes of the Peony Lantern (2005: pp. 115–117, 141–163, 356–358, 415–418, 487–503). See also Ngô (2008: pp. 131–138), Chan et al. (1992, series 1, vol. 1: pp. 70–87), and Nguyễn (1962: pp. 57–64). 20 I understand that ‘Confucianism’ is a much contested category and following Liam Kelley I agree that Confucianism in Vietnam was never a monolithic entity. Rather, it consisted of repertoires of discourses and practices. Scholars must develop a better understanding of how various repertoires drawn from certain authoritative sources were used at different times, by different parties, to do different ideological, political, institutional, and rhetorical work. It is important not to essentialize Confucianism, especially avoiding the unconscious reproduction of ideological or politicized history written by parties with vested interest in certain versions of the past. See Kelley (2006), Taylor (1995), and Nguyen (2002). 21 In traditional Vietnam the gạo tree is often believed to be haunted. Nguyen Nam (2005: pp. 415–417) has noted the idiomatic phrase which expresses this well, ‘Thần cây đa, ma cây gạo, cú cáo cây đề’ (Spirits dwell in the banyan tree, ghosts in the kapok tree, owls and foxes in the fig tree). 22 Tree spirits can sometimes be the ghosts of those who sought refuge in trees, having died some violent or accidental death in the vicinity. If given sacrifices, they can be placated and domesticated. For example, Phạm Đình Hổ’s (1768–1839) ‘Random Jottings Amidst the Rains’ (Vũ Trung Tùy Bút 雨中隨筆) contains an account which tells of how one day an aged songstress was struck dead while walking past a temple. Her spirit remained in a tree behind the temple and wreaked havoc on those who passed by, especially handsome young men, who would get sick and die. I have consulted the Quốc Ngữ translation by Trần Thị Kim Anh (2003) and the Chinese text (Chan et al., 1992, series 2, vol. 5). On this text see also Dutton, Werner and Whitmore (2012: pp. 186, 248).

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Cuong T. Mai 23 Jonathan Z. Smith (2004: p. 326). Stanley K. Stowers has also noted that family religion is fundamentally a ‘religion of place.’ It is located primarily in the household, the ancestral tomb and temple, and can be differentiated from ‘anywhere’ religions, or those practiced by itinerant, literate specialists (2008: p. 12). See also (Albertz, Nakhal, Olyan and Schmitt, 2014; Albertz and Schmitt 2012; as well as Browning, Green and Witte 2006). Here I wish to emphasize that what scholars have tended to refer to as the ‘ancestor cult’ (as a discrete cultural and social entity) is better classified as an aspect of ‘family religion.’ Thus, the ghost or the ancestral spirit is more profitably examined under the larger category of ‘family religion,’ emphasizing location, dwelling, social spaces, and social practices. 24 See for example, ‘The Book on Annamese Customs’ (An Nam Phong Tục Sách 安南風俗册) by Đoàn Triển (1854–1919), which is a compilation of prescriptive and descriptive accounts of local customs of everyday life, covering festivals, marriage ceremonies, funerals, rites of passage, the proper conduct of women and children, and many other topics. The text has been translated into Quốc Ngữ, see Nguyễn (2008). On the ancestor cult (thờ gia tiên) see pp. 49–52 and on mourning rites (việc tang) see pp. 71–79. See also Durand and Huard (1994) and Dumoutier (1904). 25 It is not known when Nguyễn Du (1765–1820) composed the ‘Requiem Summoning the Spirits of the Myriad Beings’ (Văn tế chiêu hồn thập loại chúng sinh). I have consulted the Quốc Ngữ transcription prepared by Hoài Thanh (Nguyẽn, 1965). See also Lâm (1966: p. 249). Nguyễn Du’s requiem is reminiscent of an earlier fifteenth-century poem which mentions a variety of ghostly fates of ‘lonesome spirits’ (cô hồn). The ‘Tract on Ten Admonitions to Lonesome Spirits composed in the National Language’ (Thập giới cô hồn quốc ngữ văn) is attributed to Emperor Lê Thánh Tông (1142–1497), but some scholars attribute it to Lương Thế Vinh (1441–1496). The text consists of a series of admonitions to ten classes of people, urging them to moral uprightness so as to ward off the fate of becoming ghosts. Despite the two poems differing greatly in their tone, intent, and topic, the imagery and language describing the lonely and cold fate of the wandering ghost are very similar. For the Quốc Ngữ transcription of the poem see Bùi (2000, vol. 4: pp. 435–456). On the ritual of ‘summoning spirits’ (chiêu hồn) see Dumoutier (1904: p. 57). 26 These are the shades (u hồn) belonging to the dark yin realm (u quan), but they are bound to the earth because they have ‘stagnant souls’ (trệ phách) and are unable to rise up to the heavens, nor leave the cycle of samsara, nor attain rebirth into another form. On the term ‘stagnant souls and dark spirits’ (trệ phách u hồn 滞魄幽魂), see Quảng (2013: pp. 48, 290) and on the term u quan (幽關) see p. 295. 27 As Olga Dror has noted, according to one local account recorded in 1750 by Adriano de St. Thecla, the goddess Liễu Hạnh was once a songstress who was murdered, had her corpse thrown in a river, and then became a local deity. This is an example of a person succumbing to violent and untimely death, then returning as an angry spirit to unleash fury on local inhabitants, only then to be appeased with sacrifices and later recognized as a deity (2007: p. 66;Tạ, 1989). In this account of Liễu Hạnh, the status of the songstress and the disposal of her murdered corpse in the river both signify her marginality and otherness. Thus, what Shahar and Weller have noted for Chinese popular religion we can also apply to the popular religion of Vietnam.They note, some ‘gods share the kind of premature and violent deaths, often by suicide that typify malevolent ghosts. As such, their powers come from ‘the margins, of death, and of the outside’ (1996:11). Similarly, in the hagiography of the twelfth-century eminent monk Đạo Hạnh (?-1117) as recorded in the Thuyền Uyển Tập Anh, Đạo Hạnh’s father was murdered and his corpse also thrown into a river. But it miraculously floated back to the killer to accuse the murderer (Nguyen, 1997: pp. 177, 243). The hagiography of the monk Đạo Hạnh is also found in the Việt Điện U Linh Tập and the An Nam Chí Nguyên. On the latter text, see Gaspardone (1932). 28 Jimmy Yu suggests that the term lienü 烈女, cognate with lie 列 (‘exemplary’), can be translated as ‘fierce women,’ a term which Yu says was especially used to refer to those who committed suicide. Moreover, in the stories of ‘fidelity suicides’ of late imperial China, as Yu notes, the female protagonists had multiple identities, ‘from saints to martyrs to ghosts and even gods’ (2012: pp. 94, 106). 29 More research is needed to determine whether such a range of identities can also be found in the Vietnamese tales. For example, in an early-nineteenth century collection of tales, a certain Lady Đoàn was the concubine of Ngô Phúc Du, who died in battle in 1786. Lady Đoàn was beautiful but barren. However, she was treated like a senior wife. When Ngô Phúc Du died, she smiled and comported herself as usual, which people found odd. A vegetarian feast for the late husband was held, and then Ngô Phúc Du’s wives and children went to perform a soul-summoning (chiêu hồn) ceremony where he had died in battle, off the banks of the Thúy Ái. Lady Đoàn made herself up quite beautifully, then she took a small craft to the middle of the river, threw herself in, and drowned. The people of the area set up a shrine to worship her. This story is found in the Random Records of Great Changes (Tang thương ngẫu lục 桑滄

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How not to become a ghost 偶錄) written in 1806 by Vietnamese Confucian scholars Phạm Đình Hổ (1768–1839) and Nguyễn Án (1770–1815). It purports to document significant religious and social events of eighteenth-century Vietnam. I have consulted the 1943 Quốc Ngữ edition translated by Trúc Khê (2016: pp. 70–71) and the Chinese text (Chan et al., 1992, series 1, vol. 7). On this text see also Dutton, Werner and Whitmore (2012: p. 612). More Vietnamese examples of martyr-suicide can be found in Hoàng Đạo ̣ late-nineteenth-century text, Accounts of the Righteous Conduct of Fierce Women of the Thành’s(?-1908) Great South (Đại Nam hạnh nghĩa lịêt nữ truyện 大南行義烈女傳 ), which consists of accounts of both virtuous men and women. The Chinese text can be found in Chan et al. (1992, series 1, vol. 7). Such accounts should be understood in light of the social and legal situation of women in early-modern Vietnam, for which see especially Ta (1981) and Nguyễn (2013). 30 For the tale of ‘The Righteous Wife of Khoái Châu’ see Ngô (2008: pp. 122–131), Chan et al. (1992, series 1, vol. 1: pp. 41–69), and Nguyễn (1962: pp. 45–54); and for the tale of ‘The Girl from Nam Xương’ see Ngô (2008: pp. 237–244), Chan et al. (1992, series 1, vol. 1: pp. 379–402), and Nguyễn (1962: pp. 550–63). 31 For a discussion of the ‘scholar beauty’ theme in Vietnamese verse romance, see Henry (2001: pp. 24–33), Shafer and Cao (1988), and Thong (1983). The scholarship on the ‘scholar beauty’ theme in Chinese literature is rich and abundant (Ying, 2016; McMahon, 1995; Huang, 2001). 32 See Ngô (2008: p. 127), Chan et al. (1992, series 1, vol. 1:43), and Nguyễn (1962: p. 51). 33 On ‘sacrificial prayers’ (văn tế) see Cordier (1933: p. 161). In the Chinese context, such prayers or elegies (jiwen 祭文) were addressed to the recently deceased, in hopes of communicating with them. See Judge and Hu (2011: p. 288) and Swartz (2014: p. 329). 34 恩情切至, 勿以幽冥為間, see Ngô (2008: p. 129), Chan et al. (1992, series 1, vol. 1: p. 44); Nguyễn (1962: p. 52). 35 See Ngô (2008: p. 129), Chan et al. (1992, series 1, vol. 1: p. 44), and Nguyễn (1962: p. 52). 36 Nam Nguyen has translated the full story and provides a detailed discussion, including an examination of the local Vietnamese cult of the Goddess Vũ based on the story (2005: pp. 444–461, 549–563). 37 The figure of He Jian refers to the story by Liu Zongyuan (773–819) in which an infamous woman of He Jian was known as a shameless adulteress. The name became synonymous with adultery in chuanqi narratives (Luo, 2015: p. 118). 38 In the Lệ Nưong story the grave serves this function. In the Nhị Khanh story it is Trưng Vương Temple and in the Thị Thiết story it is the expiatory altar by the river. These sacred spaces serve as temporary portals, passageways from one realm to another. 39 The same could be said of the Chinese novel with regard to popular religion in China, as Mark Muelenbeld has shown (2015). 40 Similarly, William LaFleur argues that a part of the somatic reality of the Buddhist hungry ghosts in medieval Japan extended from the physical experience of the effects of their actions in the world. They eat feces and effluvia, air, fire, and water, resulting in phenomena that we experience everyday (but which we would now call evaporation or oxidation) (1989). 41 In other genres of storytelling in traditional Vietnam one also finds variations on similar discursive tensions. Thus, they are not unique to stories of ghosts and spirits. 42 This is not to say karmic retribution is unmentioned in the tales of transmission of marvels (truyền kỳ). On the contrary, the theme of karmic retribution is quite prominent but not commonly invoked as the logic behind stories of suicide martyrs.

Further reading Durand, M. M. and Nguyen,T. H. (1985) An Introduction to Vietnamese Literature.Translated by D. M. Hawke. New York: Columbia University Press. A helpful and brief introduction to Vietnamese literature through the 1970s. Dutton, G. E., Werner, J. S. and Whitmore, J. K. (eds). (2012) Sources of Vietnamese Tradition. New York: Columbia University Press. A valuable anthology of select source material on Vietnamese culture and history, arranged according to time period and theme. Poo, M. (ed). (2009) Rethinking Ghosts in World Religions. Leiden: Brill. This edited collection explores the place of ghosts and spirits across various religious traditions, and includes several essays on the traditions of Asia.

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Cuong T. Mai Taylor, K. W. (2013) A History of the Vietnamese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor provides an extensive and detailed study of Vietnamese history in English.

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Cuong T. Mai Nguyen, N. (2002) ‘Being Confucian in Sixteenth Century Vietnam: Reading Stele Inscriptions from the Mac Dynasty,’ in: Confucianism in Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh City:Vietnam National University, pp. 139–157. Nguyen, N. (2005) Writing as Response and Translation: Jiandeng xinhua and the Evolution of the chuanqi Genre in East Asia, Particularly Vietnam. PhD dissertation, Harvard University. Nguyễn, T. (1962) Vaste recueil de légendes merveilleuses. Translated by Nguyễn, T. H. Paris: Gallimard. Nguyễn, T. G. (2013) ‘Câu chuyện về nàng Liệt Nữ Mỵ Ê (trong Việt Điện U Linh của Lý Tế Xuyên) và thực tế lịch sử,’ Tạp chí Khoa học Đại học Quốc gia Hà Nội, 29(3), pp. 36–46. Peng, M. (2015) ‘The Invisible and the Visible: Communicating with the Yin World,’ Asian Ethnology, 74(2), pp. 335–362. Phạm, Đ. H. (2003) Vũ trung tùy bút. Translated by T. T. K. Anh. Hanoi: Nhà Xuất Bản Khoa Học Xã Hội. Phạm, Đ. H. and Án, N. (2016) Tang thương ngẫu lục. Translated by T. Khê. Hanoi: Nhà Xuất Bản Khoa Học Xã Hội. Phan, J. D. (2014) ‘Rebooting the Vernacular in Seventeenth-century Vietnam,’ in: Elman, B. (ed). Rethinking East Asian Languages,Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000–1919, Koninklijke Leiden: Brill, pp. 96–127. Poo, M. (1997) ‘The Completion of an Ideal World: The Human Ghost in Early-Medieval China,’ Asia Major, 10(1/2), pp. 69–94. Poo, M. (2000) ‘Ghost Literature: Exorcistic Ritual Texts or Daily Entertainment?’ Asia Major, 13(1), pp. 43–64. Poo, M. (ed). (2009) Rethinking Ghosts in World Religions. Leiden: Brill. Poo, M. (2017) ‘The Taming of Ghosts in Early Buddhism,’ in: Poo, M., Drake, H. A. and Raphals, L. (eds). Old Society, New Belief: Religious Transformation of China and Rome, ca. 1st-6th Centuries. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 165–181. Quảng, M. (2013) Thủy lục chư khoa. Hanoi: Nhà Xuất Bản Hồng Đức. Schneider, P. (1995) ‘Khảo cứu bản dịch nôm Truyền Kỳ Mạn Lục,’’ Tạp Chí Hán Nôm, 1.22, pp. 14–24. Segal, A. F. (1989) Life after Death: A History of the Afterlife in the Religions of the West. New York: Doubleday. Shafer, J. C. and Cao, T. N-Q. (1988) ‘From Verse Narrative to Novel: The Development of Prose Fiction in Vietnam,’ The Journal of Asian Studies, 47(4), pp. 756–777. Shahar, M. and Weller, R. P. (eds). (1996) Unruly Gods: Divinity and Society in China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Schmitt, J. -C. (1998) Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society. Translated by T. L. Fagan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, J. Z. (1978) Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, J. Z. (2004) Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sourvinou-Inwood, C. (1995) ‘Reading’ Greek Death: To the End of the Classical Period. New York: Oxford University Press. Stowers, S. K. (2008) ‘Theorizing the Religion of Ancient Household and Families,’ in: Bodel, J. and Olyan, S. M. (eds). Household and Family Religion in Antiquity. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 5–19. Swartz, W. (2014) ‘Imaging Self and Other,’ in: Swartz, W., Campany, R. F., Lu, Y. and Choo, J. J. C. (eds). Early Medieval China: A Sourcebook. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 325–331. Tạ, C. Đ. T. (1989) Thần, người, và đất Việt. Westminster, CA: Nhà Xuất Bản Văn Nghệ. Ta, V. T. (1981) ‘The Status of Women in Traditional Vietnam: A Comparison of the Code of the Lê Dynasty (1428–1768) with the Chinese Codes,’ Journal of Asian History, 15(2), pp. 97–145. Tai, H.-T. H. (1985) ‘Religion in Vietnam: A World of Gods and Spirits,’ in: Vietnam: Essays on History, Culture and Society. New York: Asia Society, pp. 22–39. Taylor, K. W. (1995) ‘Voices Within and Without: Tales from Stone and Paper about Đỗ Anh Vũ (1114– 1159),’ in: Taylor, K. W. and Whitmore, J. K. (eds). Essays into Vietnamese pasts, Southeast Asia Program. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, pp. 59–80. Taylor, K. W. (2011) ‘Literacy in Early Seventeenth-century Northern Vietnam,’ in: Aung-Thwin, M. and Hall, K. R. (eds). New Perspectives on the History and Historiography of Southeast Asia: Continuing Explorations. London: Routledge, pp. 183–197. Taylor, K. W. (2013) A History of the Vietnamese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Teiser, S. F. (1996) ‘The Spirits of Chinese Religion,’ in: Lopez, D. S. (ed). Religions of China in Practice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 3–37. Theiss, J. (2005) Disgraceful Matters: The Politics of Chastity in Eighteenth-century China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Trần, N. (1997) ‘Tiểu thuyết chữ Hán Việt Nam, danh mục và phân loại,’ Tạp Chí Hán Nôm, 4(33), pp. 485.

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21 THE CAT CAME BACK’ Revenant pets and the paranormal everyday Sara Knox

‘Ghosts seem to know as little about themselves as we do, so that, if we are to discover anything, we must make haste, before we become ghosts ourselves.’ Andrew Lang, Cock Lane and commonsense If the internet is made of cats, reddit.com (reddit) is its temple. Adrienne Massanari, Participatory culture, community and play

Introduction This chapter brings into view a little studied phenomenon of ghost belief: the pet that returns to its owner, and home, after death. The revenant pet is one incarnation of the benevolent spirit ‘visitation’ (Bennett 1999: 49), but is more unassuming than its human counterpart—so unobtrusive that it seems to have passed beneath scholarly notice. If the study of ghost belief lacks academic respectability (Bennett 1999: 2–3; Goldstein, Grider and Banks 2007: 7; Hufford 1982; Hufford 2010; Lipman 2014: 4; 6), the study of belief in non-human ghosts is still more beyond the pale. Academic work around contemporary beliefs in the afterlife remain largely anthropocentric. Although areas of scholarship such as Animal Studies and Anthrozoology are mindful of issues around animal death, they do not stretch to eschatological matters.Whether the disciplinary area of concern is death (Death Studies, Bereavement Studies) or animals (Animal Studies, Anthrozoology) discussions about an animal afterlife take the shape of debates about ensoulment, and to what ’beyond’ such souls might collectively go. They do not address the question of the spectral return of individual animals. Formal belief systems are emphasized (viz. Royal, Kedrowicz & Snyder 2016). In her introduction to the edited collection Mourning Animals de Mello briefly explores cultural and religious traditions about the spiritual place of animals vis-àvis humans—a focus on the collective afterlife that can provide no theoretical space for accounts of the ghostly return of individual pets. Even when beliefs in an animal afterlife are discussed, the focus is easily shifted—for example, when de Mello pivots from a discussion of beliefs in an animal afterlife to a discussion of mourning ritual itself as ‘afterlife’ (de Mello 2016: xix). Bereavement Studies is one area of study where we might expect cognizance of the phenomenon of animal ghost visitations. The emotional impact of pet death is being increasingly explored (see, 262

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for instance, Podrazik et. al. 2000; Anderson 2009). The death of that ‘unique individual creature whose presence is associated with our private hours of leisure and whose life is in our hands’ (Grier 2006: 320) can be a significant loss, and the grief attendant to that loss is still socially disenfranchised. Grief at losing a pet can also be uniquely complicated by the stress and guilt surrounding the decision to have an animal euthanized. Despite the invitation to critical comparison provided by a growing body of literature exploring bereaved people’s experiences of sensing the presence of their dead (Rees 1971: 40; see also Bennett, Hughes and Smith 2005; Steffen and Coyle 2010; Hufford 2010: 149), bereavement studies leave the phenomenon of animal visitations out in the cold (Packman, Carnack and Ronen 2012 do, however, make some moves in this direction). Death studies has also been shy on the matter of animal death and animal afterlives. Davies’ chapter on ‘Pet Death’ in his Death, Ritual and Belief follows the chapter on belief in the afterlife and sensing the presence of the dead, but makes only brief reference to the visitation of revenant pets. In that section, Davies steps back from his analysis to allow the words of the parishioners surveyed to describe how the dead pet might, as one respondent puts it, ‘keep with their owners’ (Davies 1997: 171). Davies, however, does not attempt to contextualize his assertion that ‘animals . . . help form the network of relationships underlying daily existence’ (1997: 167) in relation to his finding in the chapter previous that ‘people see [their human] dead . . . within the domestic circle . . . in their own home and in contexts where they were used to seeing the deceased when alive’ (1997: 154). Bennett (1999) misses a similar opportunity for analysis. In a work that lets the research participants have their own say; one that includes substantial sequences of transcript for analysis, and takes its nomenclature for the supernatural from the words of the widows who tell of their dead returning, Bennett turns a deaf ear to the data when it is one widow’s account of being visited by her dead cat. That someone mentioned such a visitation is noted (Bennett 1999: 41), but the account itself does not appear, and remains unexplored.1 This would seem to be an analytical oversight given that one preoccupation of her study is the visitation as evidence of continuing bonds. Bennett observes ‘[c]lose family members cannot be replaced and the dead are still needed’ (1999: 31), but she does not pause to consider if her interviewee’s dead cat should be counted among the family dead. The following chapter is an attempt to make the kinds of connections that Davies and Bennett neglect. Through an analysis of visitation accounts shared in the anonymous online space of the subreddit, Paranormal-r, I aim to highlight the unique qualities of pet death, and the domestic relations that underpin the human-animal bond.

The Theory and Method of Studying Visitations The revenant pet is an unconventional topic, and one that can be helpfully framed by a discussion of theory and method. Firstly, I will discuss the theoretical roadblocks to the analysis of accounts of pet visitations as a type of experience. Secondly, I will explore the experiencefocussed work of folklore scholars who have explored the phenomenon of visitations. Following this, I will discuss the definition of ‘pet’ to highlight key characteristics of the human-animal bond and its domestic context. Fourthly, I examine the shapes belief takes, and the frameworks in which experiences of the paranormal might be evaluated. Lastly, I shall introduce the data sample and the online sharing site from which it was drawn. Where ghosts are concerned, there has been a theoretical tendency toward deflection from the experiential to the metaphorical, cultural and figurative. Sally Munt recalls Derrida’s complaint that ‘there’s never been a scholar who deals with ghosts “as ghosts”, the tendency being to ‘avoid spectrality altogether and keep presenting it as something else’ (Munt 2013: 9). Where 263

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spirit encounters are concerned, the language of analysis routinely defaults to the objective, leaving the subjective hanging. Accounts of people sensing the presence of their dead in literatures around bereavement and the psychology of grief style those events as ‘hallucinations’ not visitations (see, for example, Rees 1971). The persistence of emotional bonds or the ‘seeking’ behavior of the bereaved is explained by the workings of neural networks in the brain. Haunting is itself appropriated as a cultural metaphor, as an ‘epistemological critique of modernity’ to navigate doubt and indeterminacy (Gordon 1997:10). Risking the loss of all conceptual force, the spectral turn in a range of disciplines has generalized the ghost as metaphor (Pereen 2014: 9–11) so that it stands ‘for all manner of social lacks, silences, absences and inequalities’ (Lipman 2014: 6). Lipman writes this as preface to her own unusual maneuver of returning the ghost to the realm of experience. Co-Habiting with ghosts is an ethnographic study of ‘material, locatable hauntings’ (Lipman 2014: 7) based on data gathered from thirteen households where the inhabitants considered their home haunted. Lipman’s area of study—cultural geography—has not been immune from the spectral turn, but she avoids the metaphorical to examine the material implications of living in a haunted home, and the meanings her respondents give to that experience. Her approach is consistent with folklore studies, one of the few discipline areas where ghosts have traditionally appeared as ghosts. The experience of being haunted (or visited) is a central concern of analysis. ‘[A] project on people’s experiences of “haunted homes” requires being open to the possibility of taking supernatural experience seriously—as experience’ (Lipman 2014: 24). The uncertainty of a research subject about how to interpret the experience they are storying, the veering between a this-happened formulation and an I-felt-dreamed-imagined formulation (see Bennett 1999: 15–16; 24) in no way undercuts the fact that what is offered is a story of experience. Lipman follows Hufford’s ‘experience centered’ approach to the subject of the supernatural (Hufford 1982; Hufford 2010), so too does Hufford’s more direct scholarly descendant, folklorist Gillian Bennett. Bennett demonstrates how her respondents’ stories of visitation operate dialectically as arguments about specific personal experience but also as arguments about belief and the way the world works. Bennett writes (1999: 123, emphasis mine): the narrator has an inner need to describe events truthfully, remember them accurately, and interpret them meaningfully. She also has a social need to have her definition of the experience confirmed in order that her view of reality may be sanctioned. The force of the story is therefore at once expository and heuristic. Such stories are not only told in the context of discussions of belief, they are discussions of belief. Some of Bennett’s interviewees were more oriented toward a ‘tradition of belief ’ than others.2 Bennett identifies the predisposing factor as sociability; the strength of a woman’s circle of intimacy across the course of her life—a quality she terms ‘family love’. The women most inclined to have experienced a visitation were ’family-women’ through and through: ‘all their talk, whatever its ostensible subject, was sprinkled with references to dead and living members of the clan—aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, parents and grandparents’ (Bennett 1999: 28). In this chapter I would like to extend that insight toward a ‘more-than-human’ conceptualization of family. Scholars like Grier (2006), Tipper (2011; 2016), and Power have conceptualised ‘belonging’ in family and home as ‘not definitively contingent on human status, or [even] on [the] similarity [of companion animals] to people, but . . . instead forged through close interaction, cohabitation and engagement with one another’ (Power 2008: 552). Another aspect of Bennett’s work that is useful is her emphasis on the mundane circumstances of her respondent’s encounters with their dead, and the richly sensory nature of those 264

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encounters. For the Manchester widows that Bennett interviewed, faith (small ‘f ’) in the afterlife was ‘at heart a surprisingly material one’ (1999: 40). Their accounts of visitations, and of a more obscurely sensed presence of the dead, conceived the world of the dead as ‘entering the mundane [world]. . . through people and places’ (1999: 41). The location of these encounters was most often the bedroom (ibid: 59; 198). Of the twenty-five most frequent terms used by Bennett’s interviewees, bed and bedroom rank 13th and 14th respectively. As evidenced by the data that will be discussed below, accounts of pet visitations are even more tied to the intimate spaces of the domestic. In the threads sampled for this chapter, word usage patterns similarly highlight the intimacy of the domestic life of human and animal: ‘bed’—and, not quite so often, bedroom—are by far the most often used concrete nouns (112 occurrences, across 11 threads). The accounts of pet visitations were also more richly sensory: for instance, in the importance of the sense of touch.3 The material and sensory quality of revenant pet visitations expresses the close physical relationship people have with their pets. The definition of ‘pet’ and its etymology is worth pausing over here, considering the potent conceptual tradition that has consigned ‘pet’, as category of animal, to a theoretical cul-de-sac. The definitional status of the pet has been tied to the way an animal is personalized (by having a name bestowed upon it) and cared for (it is fed, rather than eaten). But that definition does not distinguish pets sufficiently from, say, some farm and working animals: the further requirement is the intimate sharing of space between the pet and its human. Pets belong in, and are of, the home. The word ‘pet’ derives from the action of petting, an etymology that calls ‘attention to proximity and the importance of touch’ (Grier 2006: 6) in the human-animal bond. ‘[O]ne of the most important yet unremarked behaviours of pet keeping,’ writes Grier, ‘is how close people allow the pets to come and whether they pick them up, stroke them, or handle them gently’ (2006: 61). This ‘proxemics of pet-keeping’ (Grier 2006: 62) describes the closeness of the physical bond between human and animal companion. It is a defining characteristic of the relationship. Unfortunately, the centrality of that human-animal bond and the way in which that bond is bounded by the domestic has led to the ‘pet’ being distinguished from categories of animals not ‘tainted’ by human/domestic acculturation. Like Animal Studies more broadly, Anthrozoology (the study of human-animal relations) tends to focus on certain categories of animals to the exclusion of others: pets being the case in point. Pets have been conceptualized as ‘inauthentic’ animal (see the critique of Berger in Fudge 2008:24; and in Ambros 2012: 13–14) or as ‘pseudo’ animal. Inversely—but with much the same effect—they have been conceptualized as pseudo-human ‘man-animal’ (Leach, quoted in Fudge 2008: 17). As Fudge points out, however, the ‘pet is loved because it is an animal’ (Fudge 2008: 20, emphasis in original). According to Grier ‘the apparent desire of . . . owners to experience . . . the wholeness and otherness of animals’ is in tension with ‘an equally apparent trend toward increasing control of our pets’ lives’—partly to keep them safe (2006: 319). This tension at the heart of pet ownership is thrown into stark relief when the final loving act for a pet might be brokering its death. In the awful final scene in the veterinary’s office the human companion’s embrace of the animal’s otherness and the ethic of control both unravel dramatically, and with emotionally bruising results. As Grier puts it, ‘their lives are in our hands’ (2006: 320). To be with a beloved pet as it is euthanized means knowing that it is no agent in its dying; that it does not know what is going on and cannot reciprocate your goodbyes and final assurances. There is no equivalent for this in the dying of the people near to us. Contemporary styles of dying4 are quite different where human-human and human-animal relationships interrupted by death are concerned. There’s the factor of the cost of pet death: insurance is expensive (and rarely taken out) and there are no subsidised health systems or prescription lists to defray such costs. Interment choices aren’t cheap—pet funerals and cremations are an expanding aspect of an already booming worldwide 265

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pet industry, and one that’s unregulated—unlike it’s human equivalent (Hawes 2014; Schopen 2014). There is little social recognition and social support for grief at an animal’s death, and in Western nations at least, no shared and formal ritual outlet for mourning. Another significant difference revolves around the tension between control and helplessness.The human companion manages the timing of a pet’s death (in the case of euthanasia) but is vulnerable to the sudden and unexpected loss of an animal (accidents on the road, deaths caused by the neglect or cruelty of others). Traditions of dominion like dog training regimes and the control of outdoor access for cats work tactically to manage the untoward. They also tie the animal into human routines and domestic spaces in unique ways. The intimate intensities of living with another creature are highlighted at the point of an animal’s dying. Another unique aspect of pet death is the deathlike loss of an animal’s disappearance. Pets stray, or become lost. In her perceptive reading of the cultural inheritance of Lassie Come Home and the myth of the dog returning against all odds, Fudge writes that ‘the story of the come-home is also its other: the story of the forever lost’ (2008: 33). Our human dead (with a few exceptions) do not vanish in this way. An additional distinction of pet death (and the spectre of the lost pet) is the abject visibility of that loss—there are the constant reminders in the little corpses that we whizz by on our roads, and the posters for missing pets tacked up on notice boards and telephone poles. Power (2008) has shown there is a distinctive interspecies sociality in homes where companion animals cohabit. Pets have an agential role in making family and the space of home. Becky Tipper extends Power’s work to explore the ways in which pets are imbricated with routine and ritual; with the spaces of the personal in home (Tipper 2011) and neighborhood—spaces rendered strange by the loss of a familiar animal. Examining the mourning responses of a small English community to the death of a local cat Tipper describes the ways in which the locals mourned the loss of ‘Vince’. They missed his company and his distinctive personality. They missed the way his routines intersected with their own. And they noted the loss of something subtler still, something that might be understood as the work of emplacement. ‘People knew Vince, yet it was notable that they also felt known by him. . . . Vince was called a “friend,” a “mate,” and a “neighbor” ’ (Tipper 2016: 94, see also Grier on the significance of mutual recognition 2006: 8–9; 169). Tipper’s focus is on the expansion of kinship relationships to include the non-human, but her data here is also suggestive of the way Vince’s ‘neighbors’ experienced the neighborhood as a place. The death of an animal impacts those relationships, and that sense of place, and accounts of the ‘haunting’ of a domestic space by a departed animal evidence this in a range of ways, as I shall demonstrate below. The question of belief, and its frameworks, are central to any study of this kind. Recent studies suggest a divergence between the formal dictates of faith, and private beliefs and practices which are at once ‘informal’ and ‘non-institutionalized’ (Bennett, 1999: 111). Cowdell’s ethnographic research project in Southeastern England found that his respondents’ beliefs in ghostly matters were ‘individual and eclectic’, with ‘a certain theoretical formality but no expression in congregational practice’ (2013: 161).5 Like Bennett before him, Cowdell concludes that there is ’widespread dynamism of thought and discussion around heterodox beliefs and experiences of ghosts’ (ibid.). Day suggests that belief is relational, experiential and implicitly social, rather than a mechanism of creed and religion (Day 2011: 27–28; 193–195). Day’s informants had ‘no . . . struggle or concern about slippage of terms to describe what was everyday, paranormal, religious, secular or logical. There was no obvious distinction between the everyday and the “ever after” ’ (Day 2013: 150). When belief is unbound from its religious framework, ‘transcendence’ is ‘shifted onto an everyday, human, social scale’ (ibid). Day’s theorisation of belief through the ‘lens of relationality’ (ibid) is useful for understanding the online sharing and storying of ‘witness’ encounters6 of the return of revenant pets. The ‘everyday, human, social’ is precisely the scope of 266

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the experience storied on Reddit’s paranormal-r, where transcendence equates, at least in part, to a coming to terms with the ambiguity of experience. This process of coming to terms occurs dialogically through the self in dialogue with itself (a working out of experience in the storying of that experience) and the self in dialogue with others. Approaching the data through ‘the lens of relationality’ (Day 2103: 150) opens up a range of possibilities when networks of ‘belonging’ are extended to include the companionship bond between people and their pets. The research for this chapter is based on a modest sample of eleven threads on Paranormal-r, a sub-site (‘subreddit’) of the online sharing site reddit. Threads were chosen on the basis that the originating post described a visitation, and that the originating post and responses included substantial narrative components (the storying of an encounter). The search terms employed in identifying the postings were ‘dog’, ‘cat’ and ‘animal’, although the first two of these generated the most hits. Threads describing animal behaviour in response to the appearance of human ghosts (or other uncanny events) were excluded. A thematic narrative analysis was done of the threads, using open coding and concept-mapping. Additionally, some lexical analysis was undertaken (using text analysis software) but the instances of usage of key words were manually checked for context. Reddit is a highly accessible sharing site that provides a forum for participants whose offline identities are in no way tied to their online reddit identity—unless they choose to provide personal identification information. For the paranormal-r subreddit ‘sharing stories and discussing them . . . behind a wall of anonymity’ is, in this redditor’s words, ‘what it’s all about’ (Twich717 2014, ). Reddit’s eclecticism and bottom-up approach to moderation differentiates it from other content sharing sites.7 The demographics of reddit can be difficult to ascertain when the ties between online and offline identities are loose, but one recent Pew Research Center survey finds that male users outnumber female users 2:1; that most users are white (70%), young (60% in the 18–29 age bracket and 29% from 30–49), and politically liberal (Barthel et. al. 2016). Forty-three percent of reddit users (as measured by the country originating the site traffic) are North Americans: the largest geographical demographic represented on the site (Statista 2017). paranormal-r is a user moderated sub-site of reddit that invites true stories of paranormal encounters of all kinds, and it distinguishes itself from other subreddits for legend-tripping, horror and ghost stories by the stricture that all contributions must concern an actual experience. One of the weaknesses of reddit as a research data source is the way in which the site functions as an echo-chamber. Disagreement and incivility can lead to the down-voting of a post. This creates an incentive to fall in with the opinions of others and to ‘appease the general view point of the majority’ (VoltageHero 2017, ‘Reddit is still an echo-chamber’). It might be objected that the echo chamber casts the validity of findings such as those below into doubt. I would argue that this is not the case. Contestation is not uncommon in the accounts of pet visitations shared on paranormal-r, even if there are limits to how reservations might be expressed. Secondly, the area of experience these redditors are discussing is marginalized, even in discussions of the paranormal. As such, it is difficult to find a general viewpoint that needs appeasing. There is also a tone of discovery and relief in many of the postings examined which suggests there may be less ‘chiming in’ than ‘opening up’ happening in the sharing of these accounts (this is consistent with the findings in Gibson’s [2015] study of the shared grief practices of bereaved teenagers vlogging on Youtube).

Analysis of data from paranormal-r I always slept in the bedroom I had as a child, and my grandmother [would] always . . . sort of tuck me up in bed when I was lying there, and [after she died] I FELT THIS 267

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whenever I went back to that house. I always felt that someone came into the bedroom when I was in bed. Not a frightening thing, a good thing, a comforting sort of thing. . . . I sort of had the sensation of the door opening, because she always liked the bedroom doors closed, you see. Clara, cited in Bennett: 78–79, emphasis in original

. . . suddenly I hear a scratching sound on the hard wood floors next to our bed. . . . the EXACT sound that our old dog used to make as she tried to get up from the floor. It was hard for her old bones and she would stumble and struggle to get her footing due to her advance age. Her nails could make this distinctive sound on the floor as she struggled to get up. damell2blue 2015

Despite the different tense of the telling, and that one story tells of a dead grandmother and the other tells of the family dog, these accounts of visitation share a lot in common. Both stories describe routines and habits. Both stories portray the personhood in miniature of the departed. Both stories take place in a bedroom, one of the most intimate space in the home. Both stories recount sensory encounters. Both stories map domestic space in material terms that are also implicitly relational. The differences between the two are just as marked. The first account is from a face-to-face interview conducted in the interviewees own home, whereas the second is written and posted online, the initial thread-generating post on the reddit subsite paranormal-r. One comes from the encounter of an interviewer with their research subject.The account has a context of time and place, and the story told is tailored for the hearer, and the occasion of hearing. As Bennett points out, the face-to-face interview is a delicate dialogue and ‘a speaker may abandon a story simply because the listener has glanced at her hands’ (1999: 117–118). An online posting has a completely different modality of engagement. And while the first story comes to us because the data is used in a publication (and cannot be found without first sourcing that publication), the second is an ‘immortal’ digital offering, available with a simple string search on Google, or by subject search to anyone directly visiting https://www.reddit.com/, whether that visitor is a user with a login or not. In this way, the key differences between the two accounts relate not to content but to the form of the account: to its moment, its cultural venue, its mode of circulation, and the nature of its user demographic. The youth of reddit users reflects a significant demographic observation for the study at hand. The youth of reddit users appears not only in the demographic statistics, but also in the frequent references to ‘my dad’ and ‘my mom’ on the paranormal-r subreddit thread.The context of these references in first-person accounts of visitation, testifying to the direct experience of the person posting, indicates that the redditor still lives at home with one or both of their parents. For the young, the death of a pet may be their first experience with death and mourning—and their second, and their third, given the relatively short lives of domestic animals. A person might see generations of pets turned over (and under) across the span of childhood, adolescence and young adulthood (see Podrazik et. al. 2000: 362; Hewson 2014: 381), let alone throughout later life. The threads on paranormal-r devoted to animal visitations commonly indicate such losses in series, and this gives rise to one of the points of difference between these accounts and accounts of people sensing the presence of, or being visited by, their dearest (human) dead. Accounts of human visitations frequently testify to an ongoing presence, or repeated encounters, with a deceased person familiar to the percipient, but I could find no accounts of successive or multiple visitants. The comments and stories shared on paranormal-r of revenant pets, by contrast, 268

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routinely identify multiple pets.8 ‘All of my pets have visited me after they died. ALL of them. . . . ’ (AvidLebon,‘Ghost of My cat or just me being depressed?).The reciprocity of the bond demands that return.The same reddit user writes, ‘I’d find it strange if they didn’t visit us, if we loved them and they us’ (ibid). Beginning with a confirmatory ‘I too have’, another redditor testifies to how she’s ‘heard’ her ‘cats after they pass’ and that ‘even the other cats respond’ (Lisabauer58, ‘Do Spirits of Pets exist?). While such visitations may only happen in the ‘few days’ after an animal’s death, Lisabauer58’s claim that she’s heard her cats, plural, indicates the visitation of different pets at different times. This persistent inhabitation happens across time, even if intermittently. These visitations also occur across the relational matrices of the home. It is not just the grieving pet owner who hears her cats, the (presumably grieving) animal peers experience the visitation.9 Like the stories told by people of visits from their human dead, the timing of visitation—in relation to the point of death—varies widely. Some people attest to visits happening in just the few days after death while others tell of visits from their dead pets that are ongoing, even if they’ve moved homes, gone interstate or shifted overseas.Writing of being visited by two dachshunds, a Boston terrier, and her anxious anticipation of the return of a recently passed Saint Bernard, one woman wonders if ‘it may be a little soon’ for it to get back to her, since it’s ‘only been a couple of months’ (HelloEvie, ‘Ghosts of pet experiences? Dogs/Birds?’). For these redditors, a former experience of the death and return of a pet shapes expectations about when and how the next passed pet will return.They rely on the compass of their own experience. Reddit users place this experience into the dialogical flow of the thread, and into discursive ‘conversation’ about animal ghosts (and, by comparison, human visitations). As such, we might expect the timing of a dead pet’s return to become an accountable matter to other users with different ideas about, or experiences of, how long it took an animal to return but there were few challenges along these lines. This pattern of acceptance is common in these threads, even when the ‘physics’ (for lack of a better word) of one person’s visitation is incompatible with that of another. An etiquette of toleration is practiced, even welcomed, as one rebuke to a skeptic makes plain: ‘I think it’s fine to be skeptical and contribute realistic explanations as long as you play nice’. ([namedeleted] 2015, Do spirits of pets exist?). The weighing of matters of detail are held in suspense, un-adjudicated, so that the more important work of conversation can go ahead. This work is on the one hand pastoral and consolatory, while on the other hand, is a co-constructed line of agreement about what constitutes the personal, familial and cosmological significance of the revenant pet’s return. Unlike the face-to-face accounts in the work of scholars like Bennett and Day, exchanges in a discussion thread feature multiple ‘conversants.’ There’s accordingly a wide canvas for the performance and confirmation of belief. Posting anonymously to an online thread affords the freedom for users to forge ahead with an account that, in a face-to-face situation, might falter at a gesture, expression or missed conversational token from the hearer. That license is tempered by the general etiquette of online exchanges, the specific etiquette of the subreddit, and—arguably—an agnostic popular discourse about the paranormal that takes ontological and epistemological uncertainty as its foundation. If, in the words of two of the research participants in Hill’s ‘popular cultural ethnography of the paranormal’ (2013: 64), the paranormal is ‘things we don’t know, or can’t explain’, then the personal experience of the paranormal is that uncertainty writ small: ‘I don’t want to say this is what it is because I don’t know’ (ibid: 67). Indeterminacy cuts both ways: the ‘I don’t want to say this is what this is’ for me, becomes an ‘I can’t say that wasn’t that’ for you.This willingness to entertain the undecidable—a range of contesting possibilities—shifts emphasis from understanding what such visitations are to the dialogical production of consensus on what they mean. And the first thing they mean is: it happened. The ‘rules’ of paranormal-r stipulate that ‘fictional stories do not belong here’, making one central etiquette the sharing of true—and generally firsthand—accounts. No legend-tripping is allowed, and neither is the 269

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spinning of horror tales, or the retelling of dreams or nightmares.10 The rules warn that ‘[r]ude, crude, insulting or inappropriate postings’ will be removed. The subredditors on paranormal-r express these strictures by courteously assuming that nobody is pulling the wool over anybody else’s eyes. If the sleeping dogs of other people’s stories shift and murmur differently from one’s own they must still be let lie. That same courtesy suggests that no definitive construction can be made of an encounter. One person’s the ‘the way it is’ may not be another’s. To assert that one person’s experience has greater indicative truth than someone else’s would breach the etiquette of toleration. One of the principle functions of the sharing of these stories is confirmation.That confirmation typically takes three associated forms: • • •

an acknowledgement of an ambiguous event as event rather than something dreamt or imagined. confirmation of the right to—and rightness of—belief. confirmation of having done the right thing by the animal’s dying: that is, confirmation as consolation.

The action of consolation and confirmation can here be usefully mapped by focusing on one 2015 thread initiated by a user’s post about the return of their elderly dog ten days after they’d had to have it euthanized. That night, lights came on in rooms that no one had entered. ‘darnell2blue’ and his wife heard the ‘distinctive sound’ of the dog’s claws scrabbling on the wooden floor beside the bed as it ‘struggled to get up’. He tells the story to emphasize that this was a waking phenomenon (‘I was drifting off but very much aware of the morning chirping of the birds outside when I heard this noise’), and an experience that had not been produced by something more mundane (‘I knew it wasn’t our other dog as he was sleeping on the bed with us’ [darnell2blue 2015, ‘Message from our dog. . .’]). darnell2blue’s story is also an example of the performative operation of ‘internal dialectic’ that Bennett identifies in her Manchester widow’s storying of their experiences of visitation. The person recounting the experience is ‘acutely aware that their audience may . . . challenge them using the familiar arguments drawn from the rationalist world view . . . . [so] they tell the story in ways designed to prevent this happening’ (Bennett 1999: 125). But whereas Bennett’s interviewees told their stories ‘in defence of a tradition of belief ’ (ibid), accounts of returning pets cannot stand on that ground—the exclusionary anthropocentric tendencies of that tradition make purchase difficult. The appeal for confirmation is therefore made by proofing the account against potential challenge, but also by an appeal to the reader’s imagination about the home as a space made by co-habitation with the pet. Domestic arrangements are given detailed explanation. The way in which the visitation reflects the routine of the house and the habits and characteristics of the dog are also included. The structure of the account mobilizes a kind of affective emplacement. The action of confirmation is performed in a variety of ways by the responses following darnell2blue’s post—not only in direct ‘answers’ to the originating post, but in the dialogue between commenters. Some of the comments aren’t directed at darnell2blue at all, but at other people’s posts. Even so, confirmation and consolation is offered. The first response in the thread begins with a thank you for sharing (‘that’s so sweet’), which itself acts to confirm both the event and its interpretation. The confirmation of belief is then actioned in a meditation on the right ethical, emotional and practical way to respond to a revenant pet: It takes a lot of energy for them to make noises or to show you something. So just answering back “hi puppy, I miss you” (or whatever you personally called 270

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her) let her know you heard her and you’re thinking of her will put you both at ease BelindaBerry 2015, Message from our dog. . .

Prompted by another redditor’s request that she explain ‘what on earth’ she means (JonDonnis, Message from our dog), BelindaBerry re-enters the thread to discuss the concept of ‘energetic being’ and the ‘energetic fields’ that can be detached from the body. Such energy is capable of crossing to ‘the Other side’, intact. If that person should return as a presence, they’ll be recognisable.Their energy is the signature of personhood and being. BelindaBerry’s explanation of how things work moves onto to the firmer ground of visitations of dead human relatives to underline the importance of her advice about what to do when a presence makes itself felt. That advice is at once practical (how to learn to perceive and recognise the ‘individual . . . energetic signature’ of the deceased), and pastoral (it’s important to trust one’s intuition). ‘If it feels like your husband (or your mother, grandmother, brother, or sister), it’s him’ (BelindaBerry 2015, Message from our dog. . .).While her comment is not a direct ‘reply’ to the original post—she has left the subject of animal visitants to discuss dead relatives—the form of her advice confirms the domestic details that anchor darnell2blue’s account of his dog’s return. The animal visitant is folded into the same domestic and familial world as the human dead: Sometimes its little things like hearing light switches clicking on and off, or a tap being turned on, or a significant song that plays on the radio after you’ve just thought of a deceased person. They try and get your attention, to let you know they are with you. BelindaBerry 2015, Message from our dog . . . Emphasis mine

Appeals for confirmation also pivot around the decision to put a suffering animal down.The final move of darnell2blue’s post is his evaluation of the meaning of the visitation: ‘I feel that perhaps it is my dog telling me that we made the right decision in putting her down which was very hard on us. It helped me feel like she was there and she was OK now’ (darnell2blue 2015, ‘Message from our dog. . .’).11 A comment following BelindaBerry’s opens with formal consolation (‘I’m sorry about your dog’) then provides direct confirmation of darnell2blues own understanding of why the visitation occurred: ‘I do think she was visiting you to let you know she’s ok and to say hello’ (spicygingertea 2105, Message from our dog. . .). Spicygingertea then tells of the return of one cat and how she felt ‘the exact weight of his paws walking on the bed’ as he came to nestle down beside her. She then describes the subsequent visit from one of her pet birds and how it pulled her hair in the playful way it had when it was alive. Confirmation and consolation are offered through an account of the continuity of the everyday relationship, the survival of those little habits and traits that mark the dead pet’s presence, and that call for its acknowledgment. One redditor’s response to the thread delicately sidesteps the question of the visitation as event and actuality to offer confirmation and consolation by another means. The emphasis here is on the importance of belief as an action in itself, and the capacity of belief to provide emotional healing. What’s necessary is taking what you can from an experience: ‘[t]here could certainly be other, more scientific, explanations but you are the author of your life and beliefs’. Affirmation is then added to confirmation (‘For myself, I believe it was your old dog’). This is followed by their confirmation of the rightness of the decision to euthanize the suffering animal: ‘. . . she was telling you she’s ok and you did the right thing. She suffers no more’ (sumthinsumthin11, Message from our dog. . .). A following comment concurs : ‘I think your [sic] right. I think she was letting you know that it was the right thing and that she is okay now’ (Sixxi, Message from our dog. . .).This pattern of confirmation is common across the sampled threads, and is performed by 271

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dialogical exchange and by internal dialectic in a single post or comment. One redditor frames their account with a detailed explanation of the decision to euthanize their cat: He was old and had developed a mass in his abdomen. The vet said that they could try to remove it, but honestly [sic] she didn’t think he’d survive the surgery because of his age. She also said they could drain it to relieve some of the pressure but that would only buy him a short time and would not end his suffering. (stuck_in_TN 2013, Ghost cat?) In the paragraph following, stuck_in_TN describes the cat’s return to familiar habits and places (scratching at the basement door, coming to inspect what you’re doing on the computer) and offers a rationale for the cat coming back: ‘I believe that it was his way of saying goodbye to us and to maybe comfort us’ (ibid). This cheerful, forgiving return is counterpoint to the animal’s dying. One posting to paranormal-r tells of the loss of an aged dog, and the blindness and crippling arthritis that had made the home strange to her (AvidLebon, 2015, ‘Ghost of my cat?’). The family’s decision to euthanize was fraught. The journey home from the vet was its own torture as the family struggled with the feeling that they had just murdered a ‘dear loved one’. They wondered if there was more they could have done. When they got home they were greeted by the ‘now deceased schnauzer’ running down the living room stairs. It looked at them with ‘bright sparkling eyes’ and wriggled its whole body in excited joy as it ‘pranced’ back up the stairs. This was not the ‘elderly suffering dog’ they had ‘brought to the vet’, but the dog in her prime. ‘Seeing that,’ the poster writes, ‘instantly releases the guilt of killing a loved one’. AvidLebon admits, however, to being confused about why the revenant pet appeared in her prime, while the deceased grandparent returned as fragile as she’d been at death, dragging her ventilator machine along behind her. AvidLebon decides that it is the ‘messiness’ of human dying that is at the heart of the contrast. Humans are made conscious of their decline. They are schooled in their medical condition and caught up in the complicated material technics of treatment in the last stages of life. The human dead may carry the ‘mess’ of their dying beyond death and be marked by it when they return. By contrast, animals—innocent of that knowledge and unencumbered by the technical assemblages of medicalized dying—revert to an untroubled ‘self-image’. The revenant is the very image of healthful vigour (AvidLebon, 2015, ‘Ghost of my cat?’). This cosmological working out of the visitation enacts confirmation and consolation by reversing one of the worst aspects of pet death. The ignorance of the animal about why it suffers (its lack of agency) becomes the means for it to return, transformed, as the being that never suffered. The return of the animal in its prime, to its familiar routines and places, also underscores what is at stake in the loss of the pet as a physical being, and as part of the house as home. The ‘proxemics of pet-keeping’ (Grier 2006: 62) describes the closeness of the physical bond between human and animal companion, but it also describes the way in which that physical bond is bounded by the home. That physical closeness, and its domestic context, plays out around an animal’s dying and the treatment of its body in death. Very few people pick up the body of a dead relative, wrap it in a blanket, and carry it out of the hospital for a home burial in the garden. But burying a dead pet at home is still a common practice—if the pages of ‘how-to’ advice on the internet and the 2.5 million hits for the search term on Google are anything to go by. One redditor who’d not long since put down her aged cat writes of the visitation that happened just at the moment she’d laid the last stone on its grave. Still kneeling in the dirt, she’d heard the cat’s familiar ‘talky’ meow (Guesshedidntseeme, Message from our dog). That ‘talky’ meow was greeting, thanks and absolution combined.

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Conclusion The stories of revenant pets on paranormal-r are exchanged by strangers in an anonymous online sharing space. They offer mutual consolation in a ‘powerful fusion of shared experience’ (Walter 2007: 173) that confirms the experience as experience. The return of the dead animal to the home is a source of consolation. The more profound consolation comes from shared understandings that the animal’s purpose in returning is to offer comfort. The revenant comes back healthy and happy, untroubled by either its illness or the circumstances of its demise. There is an immediacy and an unprecedented closeness about pet death, and the online exchange of accounts of revenant pets constitute a powerful antidote to those pressing realities. The stories discussed above also show how the lives—and the dying—of pets are closely bound up with domestic spaces and routines. What Grier terms the ‘proxemics of pet-keeping’ (2006: 62) manifest in the continuing ‘closeness’ of the animal after death, and in the sensuous materiality of its return. Key words: pet grief, ghosts, paranormal experiences, pet loss, animal death

Biographical Note Associate Professor Sara Knox presently teaches Cultural Studies and English in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University. Her research focuses on the cultural history of death, and the representation of violence. She is author of Murder: A Tale of Modern American Life (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998) and a member of the International Editorial Advisory Board of Mortality.

Further Reading Anderson, P. (2009) ‘When love hurts’: the powerful bond between people and pets: our boundless connections to companion animals. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. ABC-CLIO eBook Collection. A wide-ranging social scientific study of the human-animal companionship bond, with a section dedicated to the implications of contemporary trends in pet ownership for how owners deal with the death of an animal. Bennett, G. (1999) Alas, poor ghost: traditions of belief in story and discourse. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. A landmark study of contemporary ghost belief that draws on the history of supernatural belief and the traditions of scepticism countering it. Using extensive field research and in depth interview analysis, Bennett explores the everyday, domestic encounters of her respondents with their dead. Day, A. (2013) Everyday ghosts: a matter of believing in belonging. In O. Jenzen and S. R. Munt, eds., The Ashgate Research Companion to Paranormal Cultures. Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, pp. 149–158. Using qualitative interview data to explore her respondents’ beliefs in, and experiences of, the supernatural, Day reframes anthological and sociological understandings of belief. She demonstrates the ways in which transcendent experience has been shifted into the everyday, and specifically onto belief in social relationships. Fudge, E. (2008) Pets [Series: The art of living]. Stocksfield Hall, UK: Acumen. An interdisciplinary meditation on the complex ethical and social implications relationship of the companionship animal bond. Fudge examines the ways in which the decision to keep and care for an animal as a pet defines what it means to be human. Grier, K. C. (2006) Pets in America: a history. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. A cultural history of pet ownership in the United States that examines the major technical, demographic and social changes in the 19th and early 20th century that have shaped contemporary pet ownership

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Notes 1 Bennett (41) includes ‘animal ghosts’ as a kind of ‘traditional stereotype’ of ghostlore that goes along with other ‘legendary motifs’ like ‘haunted gardens, churchyards and crossroads’. 2 See Bennett’s discussion of the opposed traditions of belief and disbelief (1999: 33–38). 3 Bennett’s research with human percipients showed sight to be the dominant sensory mode for visitation encounters, as revealed by the statistics of word usage patterns in her data set:‘see’ outranked ‘touch’ 3 to 1 and ‘hear’ 4 to 1 (1999: 196). 4 See Kellehear’s work on ‘cosmopolitan’ styles of dying, and particularly the stigmatized, institutionalized dying of the elderly (2007: 191–234). 5 Royal, Kedrowicz and Snyder’s 2016 survey of the beliefs of Americans in an animal afterlife has a different finding in this respect. They tentatively suggest that religious belief may undercut belief in an animal after-life. However, the thrust and wording of the survey was such that respondents may have read the question as related solely to the context of a collective afterlife. 6 Bennett’s use of the term ‘witness’ connotes the active relationship between the living and the dead, and the mundane, domestic frame of that relationship (1999: 167–168). 7 See Massanari (2015: 9–10) on the ‘gatekeeping’ processes of subreddit moderation, and the first-rating equals most-influential predicator of rank created by its up-voting and down-voting system. 8 Indications of this are routine. For example: ‘I had a few hang around for a while’ (Technocassandra 2014, ; ‘I have seen or felt at least 3 of my deceased cats’ (Piscesrsing13, ibid); ‘My wife and I have owned Rottweilers for over 40 years now. I have seen those that have passed sunning themselves in the back garden or just walking around.’ (TonyJay54 2017, Is my dog still with me?) 9 This is a very different role for both the living and the dead animals in the house from that revealed by Finucane (2002), in respect to ghost belief in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth century when animals might herald the presence of a supernatural entity but seldom appeared as visitants themselves: either to human witnesses or to other animals. 10 On first glance it seems that there is a routine flouting of the ‘no dreams and nightmares’ rule where accounts of visitations are concerned. But it is less a breaking of the rule than a determination on its relevance: the nature of the dream encounter as encounter, not dream. The appearances of the dead in dreams—conceived as a species of visitation, rather than the working of the subconscious—are a welldocumented feature of recorded accounts of visitations. Accounts of pet visitation in the mass market texts that do address the phenomenon similarly attest to the dream encounter as actual. To the percipient, dreams are a liminal place to which the dead might more easily come: viz. ‘the dream abruptly stopped, everything went blank, and suddenly, Henry [the author’s dead pet rat] appeared as clear as day’ (Sheridan 2003: 215; see also 222; 226). 11 It’s also worth noting here that the originating post also appeals for confirmation by its neutrality; its lack of self-interest as signalled by the reddit specific mechanism of the decision made ‘self ’ post (a kind of posting that does not add ‘karma’ to the user in terms of the site wide point system).

References Ambros, B. R. (2012) Bones of contention: animals and religion in contemporary Japan. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press. Anderson, P. (2009) ‘When love hurts’: the powerful bond between people and pets: our boundless connections to companion animals. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. ABC-CLIO eBook Collection. Bae, B. B. (2017) Belief and acceptance for the study of religion. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 29(2), pp. 57–87. Baldwin, J. (2013) Trance, transfiguration and trust: spiritualism in Western Australia. In: O. Jenzen and S. R. Munt, eds., The Ashgate Research Companion to Paranormal Cultures. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, pp. 351–362. Barthel, M., Stocking, G., Holcomb, J and Mitchell, A. (2016) Reddit news users more likely to be male, young and digital in their news preferences. Media release. 25 February. Pew Research Center. Available at: www.journalism.org/2016/02/25/reddit-news-users-more-likely-to-be-male-young-and-digitalin-their-news-preferences/ Viewed 14 July 2017. Bennett, G. (1999) Alas, poor ghost: traditions of belief in story and discourse. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press.

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The cat came back’ Bennett, K. M., Hughes, G. M., and Smith, P. T. (2005) Psychological response to later life widowhood: coping and the effects of gender. Omega Journal of Death and Dying, 51 (1), pp. 33–52. Cowdell, P. (2013) ‘A giant bedsheet with the holes cut out’: expectations and discussions of the appearance of ghosts. In O. Jenzen, and S. R. Munt, eds. The Ashgate Research Companion to Paranormal Cultures. Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, pp. 159–170. Davies, D. J. (1997) Death, ritual and belief: the rhetoric of funerary rites. London, UK: Cassell. Day, A. (2011) Believing in belonging: belief and social identity in the modern world. London, UK: Oxford University Press. Day, A. (2013) Everyday ghosts: a matter of believing in belonging. In O. Jenzen and S. R. Munt, eds., The Ashgate Research Companion to Paranormal Cultures. Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, pp. 149–158. De Mello, M. (2016) Introduction. In M. de Mello, ed., Mourning animals: rituals and practices surrounding animal death. East Lansing, MI: Michigan University Press. Finucane, R. C. (2002) Appearances of the dead: a cultural history of ghosts. London, UK: Junction Books. Fudge, E. (2008) Pets [Series: The Art of living]. Stocksfield Hall, Northumberland, UK: Acumen. Gibson, M. (2015) YouTube and bereavement vlogging: emotional exchange between strangers. Journal of Sociology, 52 (2), pp. 631–645. Gordon, A. F. (1997) Ghostly matters: haunting and the sociological imagination. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Grier, K. C. (2006) Pets in America: a history. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. Goldstein, D. E., Grider, S. A. and Thomas, J. B. (2007) Haunting experiences: ghosts in contemporary folklore. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. Hawes, J. B. (2014) A mourning for pets. The Post and Courier. November 7. Available at: www.postandcourier. com/features/faith_and_values/a-mourning-for-pets/article_5ca11b65-5393-572f-a5d4-aa226c93d88b. html.Viewed 24 October 2017. Hewson, C. J. (2014) Grief for pets—part one: overview and update on the literature. Veterinary Ireland Journal, 4 (7), pp. 380–385. Available at: www.veterinaryirelandjournal.com/oldsite/images/sa_jul_2014. pdf.Viewed 3 May 2018. Hufford, D.J. (1982) Traditions of Disbelief. New York Folklore, 8 (3), pp. 47–55. Hufford, D. J. (2010) Visionary spiritual experiences in an enchanted world. Anthropology and Humanism, 35 (2), pp. 142–158. Kellehear, A. (2007) A Social History of Dying. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lipman, C. (2014) Co-habiting with ghosts: knowledge, experience, belief and the domestic uncanny. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Massanari, A. (2015) Participatory culture, Community and play [Digital Formations, book 75]. New York: Peter Lang. Munt, S. R. (2103) Introduction. In O. Jenzen S. R. Munt, eds., The Ashgate Research Companion to Paranormal Cultures. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, pp. 1–29. Packman, W., Carmack, B. J., and Ronen, R. (2012) Therapeutic implications of continuing bonds expressions following the death of a pet. Omega Journal of Death and Dying, 64 (4), pp. 335–356. Pereen, E. (2014) The spectral metaphor: living ghosts and the agency of invisibility. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Podrazik, D., Shackford, s., Becker, L., and Heckert, T. (2000) The death of a pet: implications for loss and bereavement across the lifespan. Journal of Personal and Interpersonal Loss, 5, pp. 361–395. Power, E. (2008) Furry families: making a human-dog family through home. Social and Cultural Geography, 9(5), pp. 535–554. Rees, W. D. (1971) The hallucinations of widowhood. British Medical Journal, 4, pp. 37–41. Royal, K. D., Kedrowicz, A. A. and Snyder, A.M. (2016) Do all dogs go to Heaven? Investigating the association between demographic characteristics and beliefs about animal afterlife. Anthrozoös, 2(3), pp. 409–420. Schopen, F. (2014) Lots of people are getting pet funerals. Don’t, it’s a rip-off. The Guardian (Online). 15 September. Available at: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/14/pet-funerals-rip-offmoney.Viewed 24 October 2017. Sheridan, K. (2003) Animals and the afterlife: true stories of our best friends’ journey beyond death. London, UK: Hay House. Statista (2017) Regional distribution of desktop traffic to Reddit.com as of February 2017, by country. [Statista: the statistics portal] www.statista.com/statistics/325144/reddit-global-active-user-distribution/.Viewed 3 May 2018.

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22 FROM ANCESTORS TO AVATARS Transfiguring the afterlife Jenny Huberman

1 Introduction For much of human history, beliefs in the afterlife have been linked to the production of ancestors. The idea that after death, the deceased live on among other departed kin has provided countless societies with a means to both assuage death anxiety and reaffirm the centrality of the kinship system in the social and cosmological order. Indeed, given the ubiquity of such beliefs, the modern, secular understanding of death as ‘an exit pure and simple’ stands out not just as an anomaly, but also as an identifiable source of the existential dread that has accompanied the rise of Western modernity (Bauman, 1992). Numerous scholars have observed that as secularism and scientific rationality began to displace religion as the dominant framework for understanding the world, notions of the soul, the afterlife, and a universe enchanted with purpose and meaning came to be viewed with deep skepticism. People found themselves confronting the possibility that death really is the end and that life itself might be devoid of any intrinsic meaning.1 Anthropologist Abou Farman argues that within the United States, these developments, and the sense of ‘existential fragility’ they have engendered, have given rise to new attempts to achieve immortality and ‘re-enchant’ the universe, albeit through techno-scientific means. In Secular Immortal he charts some of the ways transhumanists have been at the forefront of such initiatives. While definitions and strains of transhumanism vary, at the most basic level transhumanism is an intellectual and cultural movement premised upon the idea that human beings can use science and technology to significantly enhance their capabilities and thereby overcome many of the limitations of human biology. Transhumanists believe technology will imbue us with intellectual, physical, and psychological capabilities that far surpass what present-day human beings are familiar with. This, they argue, will transform the human species and human societies in very significant ways, ultimately ushering in a ‘post-human’ future. As the movement has developed over the last three decades, one of the more notable items on the transhumanist agenda has been the attempt to achieve immortality in avatar form by developing the technology for what is variously referred to as ‘mind cloning,’ ‘mind uploading,’ ‘the transfer of consciousness,’ and ‘whole brain emulation.’ In this chapter, I explore how the transhumanist attempt to achieve immortality in avatar form compares and contrasts with the many attempts our species has made to achieve immortality in ancestral form. Following Farman, I want ‘to outline the conditions that make certain “modes of immortality” both plausible and desirable – or implausible and undesirable’ (2012a: 277

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p. 38). I ask what kinds of practices, understandings, and forms of self-discipline are these different modes of immortality predicated upon? What kinds of experiences do, and might, each of these modes of immortality give rise to? By juxtaposing the ubiquitous making of ancestors with the making of avatars among transhumanists, this chapter pursues three goals. First, it will illuminate some of the central values and beliefs that animate the transhumanist movement. Second, this chapter will provide a clearer understanding of how transhumanists are reproducing and reconfiguring the ways that human beings deal with enduring existential dilemmas. Finally, this chapter will demonstrate how conceptions of the afterlife are intimately shaped by the societal conditions from which they emerge.

2  The making of ancestors ‘Death,’ as Meyer Fortes noted long ago, ‘is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the attainment of ancestorhood’ (Fortes, 1965: p. 124). Ancestors must be made, and the ways they are made vary cross-culturally.2 In some parts of the world becoming an ancestor involves an elaborate double burial (Hertz, 1907; Metcalf and Huntington, 1982). In others places, ancestors are produced through the construction of shrines and ritual offerings (Keesing, 1970). More recently, anthropologists have proposed that seemingly secular hobbies such as family genealogy and household collecting can be viewed as ‘generative practices’ for ‘ancestralisation’ (Marcoux, 2001; Cannell, 2011; Parrott, 2011). Variations also exist in how ancestors are regarded. Some societies view ancestors as benevolent benefactors who bless and protect their surviving kin, whereas elsewhere, ancestors are regarded as punitive (Tatje and Hsu, 1969). Beliefs about the ancestral afterlife reveal a further range of cultural forms. Prior to colonization, for instance, the Wari of Amazonia maintained that upon death, ancestral spirits took the form of white lipped peccaries that emerged in the forest to be hunted and eaten by their living descendants (Conklin, 2004). Alternatively, among the aboriginal Yolngu people of Australia, the presence and power of ancestors is believed to mingle with the land, sky, and water creating a landscape that is ‘redolent’ with their ‘powers’ (Keen, 2006: p. 517). Despite variations in practice and belief, however, certain features of making and relating to ancestors do have wide distribution.The following discussion points to eight features commonly associated with the making of ancestors cross-culturally. Exploring these features can help us better understand why ancestorhood provides a desirable route to immortality in these societies. First, anthropological research has shown that beliefs in the afterlives and powers of ancestors are typically found in societies where kinship provides the dominant structure for organizing social relations and configuring identity.3 Among the Tallensi, for example, attaining ancestorhood is contingent upon one’s position in the lineage. Second, ancestorhood is fundamentally a means of immortalization. In some societies what is rendered immortal through the production of ancestors is the unique personality, ‘soul,’ or ‘spirit’ of the deceased (Newell, 1976). Elsewhere, however, it is not the person, but rather the principle of jural authority that is preserved over time (Fortes, 1965). This principle echoes the widespread observation that making ancestors is often a pivotal means for reproducing the social and political order, and reasserting membership in the group (Gluckman, 1937; Goody, 1962; Bloch, 1971; Rasmussen, 2000; Keightly, 2004; Couderec and Sillander, 2012). Third, as Bruce Lincoln (1989) notes, in such societies one of the key ways the social and political order is ensured and legitimated is by mythically enshrining the authority and power of ancestors. Fourth, in many, if not most societies, ancestors must be ritually made.The proper rituals must be performed in order for the deceased to successfully transition from the world of the living 278

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to the land of the dead. Indeed, the anthropological literature abounds with fears and stories of rituals gone wrong, or rituals neglected. In such cases, the deceased becomes a disruptive and malevolent ghost who adversely interferes in the lives of the living. The deceased may alternatively remain paralyzed by virtue of his liminal status. For example, describing the making of ancestors among the Bara of Madagascar, Metcalf and Huntington (1991: p. 129) write: The survivors must bring about the renewed conception and rebirth of their deceased kin into the world of ancestors. This process is as difficult and risky as childbirth. Should it fail, the consequence is nothing short of catastrophic infertility, with the deceased remaining like a dead fetus in the womb of the survivor’s world. Fifth, although the ethnographic record attests to a pervasive desire to maintain relationships with ancestors, cross-culturally there is almost unanimous agreement that the dead must leave the mortal world in order for them to be recouped as productive and powerful resources later on. Concomitantly, in order for the deceased to enjoy the immortality, authority, and veneration that ancestor status brings, they too must ‘accept’ the transition. As the Chuuk of Micronesia explain,‘spirits’ of the deceased ‘must learn how “to be dead” ’ (Dernbach, 2005: p. 99). Moreover, this learning to be dead frequently involves being slowly subsumed by the collective. In societies where the double burial occurs, the deceased is subsumed into the collective when, after a sufficient amount of time has passed and the flesh has decomposed from the body, his or her remains are transferred to a collective burial ground (Hertz, 1907; Bloch 1971, Hasu, 2009). Alternatively, among the Sora of eastern India, it is believed that upon death a person becomes an ancestor with whom they can communicate through the mediation of a shaman. However, over time the ancestor ‘dies a second death in the Underworld, at which point it becomes a butterfly beyond the reach of any communication with the living’ (Vitebsky, 1993: p. 15). In both cases, the importance of not just maintaining ties, but also severing them is symbolically expressed. These features of ancestor making suggest a sixth widely distributed trait; the production of ancestors frequently involves particular understandings of temporality. In societies where ancestor veneration abounds, there is a profound recognition that the past is a generative resource for securing the present and producing the future. In some places, ‘ancestor time’ is experienced as a parallel time where the past is conceived as both the present and future (Gell, 1992). However, in many places we also find a marked concern with ensuring the proper generational succession. In some societies, for instance, a son cannot offer sacrifices to or receive blessings from his patrilineal ancestors, unless his own father has died.4 Power and authority must be temporally ordered and distributed in ways that mitigate intergenerational conflict or competition. Seventh, to say that ancestors must be ritually made also refers to the fact that the making of ancestors is typically a duty carried out on behalf of one’s deceased kin, rather than a voluntary expression of personal sentiments. Achieving and maintaining immortality as an ancestor requires others who can be depended upon to fulfill their ritual obligations. In many societies, ancestorhood, like conceptions of personhood more generally, attests to the profound importance of relationality and reciprocity in human relationships. As Patricia McAnany writes, reflecting upon the ritual care ancestors receive, ‘[o]nly the intersubjectivities of personhood can render comprehensible how the dead linger and display such staying power as a fulcrum around which networks of connections . . . form, replicate, and transform’ (2016: p. x). In contrast to societies where the autonomy of individuals is highly valued, ancestors are frequently found in societies where conceptions of the self are more ‘socio-centric,’ permeable or ‘partible’ (Shweder and Bourne, 1984). Such concern for ancestors typically appears in societies where a concern with fulfilling social roles trumps a concern with expressing one's inner authenticity. 279

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Lastly, in many parts of the world, the making of ancestors is not only a collective and lengthy process, unfolding over months and even years.The production of ancestors is also understood as a crucial means of making and securing relationships to places. Indeed, in many of these societies, places and persons are regarded as mutually constitutive of each other.5 For instance, among the Cibecue Apache Indians relationships to places are organized around place-names that anchor particular geographical points to particular ancestral histories that provide the Apache with opportunities to learn from their ancestors and cultivate wisdom. As Keith Basso observes in his moving ethnography Wisdom Sits in Places, for the Apache, ‘selfhood and placehood are completely intertwined’ (1996: p. 146). In sum, ancestorhood is a mode of immortality that puts tremendous importance on eight features: the centrality of kinship, the use of myth to legitimize the social and political order, the efficacy of ritual, the ability both to maintain and to sever ties between the living and the dead, the idea that some part of the person that is separable from the body lives on after death, the notion that the past is a resource for the making of the future, the imperative of fulfilling one’s ritual obligations to others and thereby acknowledging the interdependent if not intersubjective nature of personhood, and the idea that the making of persons and places go hand in hand. Ancestorhood has thus been a desirable means of constructing the afterlife because it reaffirms relationships and practices that are widely recognized as maintaining sociality and vitality among the living.

3  The making of avatars How does the ubiquitous practice of making ancestors compare and contrast with the current attempt by transhumanists to achieve immortality in avatar form through the technology of ‘mind cloning,’ ‘mind uploading,’ ‘the transfer of consciousness,’ and ‘whole brain emulation?’ As the official mind uploading website explains: Mind uploading is a popular term for a process by which the mind, a collection of memories, personality, and attributes of a specific individual, is transferred from its original biological brain to an artificial computational substrate. Alternative terms for mind uploading have appeared in fiction and non-fiction, such as mind transfer, mind downloading, off-loading, side-loading, and several others. They all refer to the same general concept of “transferring” the mind to a different substrate.6 Once the mind has been successfully duplicated or transferred to a computational substrate, transhumanists propose that people will be able to continue leading their lives by choosing from a number of avatar forms. For instance, the pioneer of the 2045 Social Initiative Avatar project, Russian billionaire Dimtri Itskov notes that in the future people will be able download their minds into a robotic body that will enable them ‘to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, or travel in extreme situations.’7 Martine Rothblatt, a leading figure in the American Transhumanist Movement proposes that through ‘ectogenesis,’ a process which involves growing a human biological body outside of the womb, our mind clones will also have the option to enjoy a flesh-based avatar body replete with sensual delights (2013: p. 320). Perhaps the most commonly envisioned immortality scenario is that human beings will be able to upload their minds to a computer platform and live as virtual or ‘holographic’ avatars in cyberspace (Moravec, 1988; Koene, 2013; Prisco, 2013). Despite variations in the ways transhumanists envision the making of avatars, I want to focus on eight features that commonly animate these efforts. Exploring these 280

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features will highlight how the transhumanist mode of avatar immortality both resembles and diverges from ancestorhood. First, it is worth noting that avatar immortality is no less mythically enshrined than the making of ancestors. As numerous observers of transhumanism have noted, the role that science fiction has played in stimulating the transhumanist imagination cannot be overestimated (Farman, 2012a, 2012b;Valentine, 2012; O’Connell, 2017). Indeed, it could be argued that science fiction has provided the ‘mythical charter’ for a number of different transhumanist initiatives, including mind uploading. Randal Koene, for instance, is the founder and CEO of Carboncopies, an organization based in Silicon Valley that is spearheading efforts to achieve ‘substrate independent minds.’ He says that long before he earned his PhD in computational neuroscience from McGill University, Arthur Clarke’s 1956 novel The City and the Stars played a formative role in shaping his interest in mind cloning. Set in the deep future, the novel describes the futuristic city of Diaspar being ruled by a superintelligent central computer, which creates bodies for the city’s posthuman citizens, and stores their minds in its memory banks at the end of their lives for purposes of future reincarnation (O’Connell, 2017: p. 46). The transhumanist dream to master the technology of mind uploading and thereby achieve avatar immortality is therefore not created anew by each member of the movement. Rather, as is the case with the making of ancestors, this dream draws upon, and is animated by, a widely shared set of collective ‘myths’ or fictions. Second, if ancestors are typically found in societies where kinship provides the dominant structure for configuring social relations and identity, the attempt to create immortal avatars reflects the supreme importance transhumanists place on individualism, autonomy, and ‘selfdirection.’ As transhumanist philosopher Max Moore explains, ‘[s]elf-direction means “valuing independent thinking, individual freedom, personal responsibility, self-direction, self-respect, and a parallel respect for others” ’ (2013: p. 5).Transhumanists largely believe that the question of who you are and what you become should be left up to the individual, rather than decided by social or biological determinants. This emphasis on individual autonomy underscores transhumanists’ widespread attraction to libertarianism, their pursuit of ‘morphological freedom’ and ‘human enhancement,’ and it also informs their approach to the afterlife. For instance, while the making of ancestors is typically regarded as a ritual duty bestowed upon surviving kin, for transhumanists, achieving immortality in avatar form is regarded as a personal choice. Indeed, some even suggest it is a ‘right’ that must be actively pursued and defended by the individual who desires it. Kenneth Hayworth, the president and co-founder of the Brain Preservation Foundation, expresses this sentiment when he remarks: I, for one, feel as protective of my future uploaded self as I do my future physical self. I look forward to experiencing the world 100 years from now in a robotic body, and I will fight for my right to do so just as I would fight for my right to undergo any surgical procedure that could save my life. 2010: p. 15 While countless generations of human beings have entrusted their immortality to the ritual duties of others, transhumanists operate with a deep skepticism that others can be counted upon to keep them alive. For transhumanists, immortality is one of many projects that require a commitment to ‘responsibility, proactivity, and experimentation’ (More, 2013: p. 5). Indeed, the value transhumanists place on experimentation points to a third interesting difference between the making of ancestors and the making of avatars. Ancestorhood has long provided human beings with a means to express and negotiate their membership in a group and ritually affirm the importance of tradition and continuity. In most societies where ancestors 281

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are deemed important, there is a profound recognition that the past is a generative resource for the future. Paying homage to ancestors provides one means of trying to secure a future that is not only fruitful, but familiar. By contrast, the transhumanist attempt to achieve immortality in avatar form is animated by a powerful faith in ‘the principles of perpetual progress,’ ‘selftransformation,’ and ‘continual’ development. Like so many other cultural formations arising in the era of flexible accumulation, transhumanism celebrates constant innovation; its watchword is ‘transcendence’ not ‘reproduction.’ As Moore explains, transhumanists favor ‘reason over blind faith and questioning over dogma’; they advocate ‘experimenting, learning, challenging, and innovating rather than clinging to beliefs’ (ibid.: p. 3). In one of the most detailed studies to date of the contemporary transhumanist movement, literary critic Mark O’Connell notes that this ideology is part of the reason why so many transhumanists like Randall Koene gravitate to Silicon Valley. O’Connell proposes that the technoprogressivism, venture capitalism, and entrepreneurial optimism of Silicon Valley have made it an optimal place for transhumanists like Koene who are looking for investors to fund their research initiatives. Billionaire investor Peter Theil, for example, has funded transhumanist initiatives for radical life extension headed by transhumanist and gerontologist Aubrey De Grey. In 2012 Google hired famed transhumanist Ray Kurzweil to be their Director of Engineering, specifically tasked with helping the company to build ever smarter machines. After moving to Silicon Valley, Koene himself received generous funding from Russian billionaire Dimtri Itskov to start Carboncopies.This is to say, that a fourth feature of the transhumanist attempt to achieve immortality in avatar form is that it has become implicated in a larger techno-entrepreneurial culture that embraces such efforts not just because they might realize the long sought-after human wish for immorality, but also because they might realize the possibility of new sources of profit. While the profit incentive certainly explains some of the interest in the transhumanist attempt to make mind uploading a reality, for transhumanists themselves, there is an equally, if not more important set of cosmological concerns at stake.8 A number of researchers working on mind uploading-immortality initiatives are deeply skeptical about the future of the species.They are explicitly driven by annihilation anxiety and the dread of the universe becoming inherently meaningless or devoid of intelligent life. For instance, Koene proposes, that ‘if SI (substrate independence) is not achieved by the time another intelligence appears that is competitive with ours . . . it is quite possible that we may never have another chance to achieve it’ (Koene, 2013: p. 155). Similarly, computer scientist Keith Wiley argues that developing the technologies of mind uploading is ‘nearly the most important goal of our civilization.’ Expressing his concerns, he writes: This goal is met by maintaining consciousness in the form of conscious beings who escape extinction and maximize their conscious experiences. I am further concerned with insuring that humanity retains its share of that purpose by preserving our species against extinction. The alternatives, that the universe and existence could lose ultimate purpose at a needlessly early cosmic hour, or that humanity might fade into obscurity, are too horrible to bare and cannot be allowed to transpire. Wiley, 2015 Indeed, this motivation suggests a fifth feature that distinguishes the making of avatars from the making of ancestors. For transhumanists, it is not the kinship system that is reproduced and preserved as the ordering principle of the social and cosmological order, as is the case in ancestorhood, but rather it is intelligence. For transhumanists, ensuring our immortality in avatar 282

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form is regarded as one means of taking control of our future evolution and ensuring that the universe will be forever populated with intelligent life. As Ben Goertzel, another leading researcher in the field of mind uploading and author of A Cosmist Manifesto, comments, ‘[t]here’s intrinsic value in helping higher intelligence come into existence’ (2009). Moreover, as Robotics Professor Hans Moravec proposes, in order to sustain our mind-uploaded avatar lives and avoid the possibility of extinction, ‘[p]art of us will have to be discarded and replaced by new parts to keep in step with changing conditions and evolving competitors’ (1988: p. 121). Moravec’s warning thus raises the question: According to transhumanists, what exactly is rendered immortal in avatar form? As is the case with ancestorhood, transhumanists also believe that there is a part of the human being that is separable from the body and can survive the biological death of the individual. However, instead of configuring this through religious beliefs regarding spirits or souls, for transhumanists the essence of personhood resides in the mind. Moreover, because transhumanists conceptualize minds as ‘patterns of information rather than integrally tied to their material substrates (brains),’ they are confident that minds can be copied and preserved on other platforms (Geraci, 2010: p. 4). As Rothblatt explains, ‘[m]indclones, just as people, are really sets of information patterns.The information patterns of great books and works of art are copied through the ages in new media after new media, and so will be the case with mindclones’ (2014: p. 248).9 The transhumanist attempt to achieve immortality in avatar form thus attests to a sixth feature commonly associated with this mode of immortality: the profound significance that science and technology play in configuring contemporary understandings of personhood. The transhumanist conception of the ‘informatic self ’ has emerged from an influential cross-fertilization between the fields of neuroscience, computer sciences, and artificial intelligence (Farman, 2014). Indeed, among some transhumanists the notion that advanced software programs can be used to replicate the mind in another substrate has given way to conceptualizing the mind itself as software that can be easily transported to multiple devices (Kurzweil, 2005; La Torra, 2011; Rothblatt, 2013). For instance, in reflecting upon his interview with Randal Koene, O’Connell observes, ‘it was the same essential metaphor that lay at the heart of Randal’s emulation project: the mind as a piece of software, an application running on the platform of flesh’ (2017: p. 49). Seventh, this way of conceiving of the essence of personhood also suggests that the transhumanist path to avatar immortality would be much more expedient than the typically drawn-out, ritual process of making ancestors.With the proper pre-mortem preparations in place (Rothblatt proposes people will be able to rely upon ‘personality profile and avatar training tools’ to prepare for their post-biological existence), an individual could seamlessly transition into their avatar afterlife and within mere moments resume, albeit in altered form and location, their engagements with the living. As Rothblatt optimistically forecasts: I’m confident that my potential to stay connected to my family and subsequent generations of relatives will be available and nearly limitless . . . thanks to strides in software and digital technology and the development of ever more sophisticated forms of artificial intelligence, you and I will be able to have an ongoing relationship with our families: exchange memories with them, talk about their hopes and dreams, and share in the delights of holidays, vacations, changing seasons, and everything else that goes with family life – both the good and the bad – long after our flesh and bones have turned to dust. 2014: pp. 9, 10 In contrast to ancestors, who frequently require ritual propitiation and can only be approached by certain classes of surviving kin, avatars it seems would be readily accessible and would easily 283

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resume their place among the living. It is difficult to say what kinds of consequences would arise from all of this. However, it would likely have a significant bearing upon the ways people experience loss and grief. As noted above, ancestorhood is premised upon the desire to maintain relations with the deceased, but it also stems from an imperative that the deceased must accept their transition into another state in order to be recouped by the living. This ritual mandate simultaneously provides the bereaved with an opportunity to come to terms with their loss and readjust to a life without the deceased.Transhumanists, by contrast, explicitly rail against the idea of accepting death, arguing that it is a conservative ideology propagated by a timid and unimaginative ‘deathist’ culture (Farman, 2012a and 2012b).Their immortality project is animated by a stubborn refusal to leave or let go. While transhumanists conceive of an immortal life that is more or less continuous with that of the living, they also argue that avatar immortality, like ancestorhood, will imbue us with enhanced powers. If the power of ancestors is frequently wrought through symbolically merging with one’s deceased kin or lineage, transhumanists propose that the power of avatars will derive from technologically merging with computerized systems and information networks. As Moravec explains: Whatever style of mind transfer you choose, as the process is completed many of your old limitations melt away.Your computer has a control labeled “speed.” It has been set at “slow,” to keep the simulations synchronized with the old brain, but now you change it to “fast,” allowing you to communicate, react, and think a thousand times faster. The entire program can be copied into similar machines, resulting in two or more thinking, feeling versions of you.You may choose to move your mind from one computer to another that is more technically advanced or better suited to a new environment. As a computer program, your mind can travel over information channels, for instance encoded as a laser message beamed between planets. 1988: pp. 113–144 Moravec’s description of being ‘beamed between planets’ points to a final contrast between ancestralization and the production of avatars. Throughout human history the making of ancestors has provided a central means for the making of places. As Robert Pouge Harrison eloquently points out, ancestral burial grounds and shrines are key to our attempts to ‘humanize the lands where we build our present and imagine our future’ (2003: p. xi). Alternatively, in the transhumanist path to immortality it is not places that are reaffirmed and reconstituted through the making of avatars, but rather spaces. As Moravec’s remarks indicate, for some transhumanists this is meant quite literally, as they envision an afterlife where we will be equipped to travel through outer space ‘as laser messages beamed between planets’; or as Itskov proposes, in robotic avatar bodies that are capable of withstanding extreme conditions. For other transhumanists, the spaces we will occupy will be virtual ones. Future generations will upload their minds and live in cyberspace.10 In both cases, the transhumanist vision of avatar immortality is predicated upon turning away from the importance of place, and even earth, as an existential horizon of the human condition. In sum, the making of avatars points to a mode of immortality that affords tremendous importance to eight concepts: the autonomy and self-direction of the individual, the efficacy of science and technology as well as science fiction, the ideal of pursuing perpetual innovation and transcendence, a temporal orientation which views the past more as an encumbrance than resource for making the future, the notion that the essence of personhood resides in the mind and therefore can be readily transferred to another substrate, the tendency to reject death as an inevitable boundary condition that requires separation, the tendency to view our postmortem 284

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lives as coterminous with the living, and the idea that spaces rather than places will provide the most salient holding environment for the continuation of our species. Avatars, therefore, provide transhumanists with a desirable means of constructing the afterlife because they reaffirm core values and visions of the transhumanist movement.

4 Conclusion Constructions of the afterlife are intimately shaped by the societal conditions from which they emerge. They reflect the values and organizing principles of society, as well actively influence the ways people conduct their lives. For much of human history, and in many parts of the world, ancestors provide a desirable means of conceiving of the afterlife precisely because their production helps to reaffirm relationships and practices that maintain sociality and vitality among the living. Living in a world of ancestors helps to reaffirm the importance of kinship, continuity and tradition, fulfilling obligations to others, and maintaining a relationship to pasts and places that secure one’s identity over time. The current effort by transhumanists to re-envision the afterlife and live forever in avatar form thus marks an interesting departure and it warrants attention for three main reasons. First, it stands to teach us something about the ways social life is changing at the dawn of the twentyfirst century. Admittedly, the transhumanist goal of mind cloning may be a long ways off, if not ultimately a fanciful endeavor. It should also be noted that it represents a marginal rather than mainstream effort within society. However, the central features animating transhumanist immortality initiatives do, nonetheless, resonate with a wide swath of contemporary cultural forms and practices. The pervasive influence of science and technology, the value placed on constant innovation and change, the emphasis placed on individual autonomy and initiative, and the dematerialization of social lives and relations are commonly noted features of late capitalist societies. Moreover, as O’Connell (2017), Farman (2012b), and others observe, it should come as no surprise that much of the funding for transhumanist immortality initiatives comes from Silicon Valley. While ancestorhood has certainly given rise to local ritual economies throughout the world, transhumanist immortality initiatives are being actively invested in and promoted by tycoon, venture capitalists. As noted earlier, billionaire Peter Theil has supported much of Aubrey De Grey’s research on radical life extension. Elon Musk is a major investor in the new space program. Google’s founder and CEO Bill Maris decided to invest heavily in The California Life Company which is devoted to ‘solving’ the problem of death, after his own father passed away.11 In other words, the transhumanist attempt to achieve immortality and ensure the existence of an intelligent presence in the universe into the deep future points to an interesting working alliance between capitalism and cosmology and once again challenges the idea that disenchantment is an inevitable outcome of our current socio-economic system. Second, the transhumanists effort to live forever in avatar form through the technology of mind cloning or mind uploading provides an excellent opportunity to reconsider questions about the relationship between the religious and the secular in the context of late modernity. Although transhumanists by and large identify themselves as rational, secular, scientific thinkers who decry ‘blind faith’ in religion, some scholars note that their attempts to live forever in avatar form actually reproduce longstanding forms of Judeo-Christian apocalypticism (Geraci, 2010; Tirosh-Samuelson, 2012).12 Religious studies professor Robert Geraci, for instance, describes transhumanism as a ‘new religious movement’ that: advocates a ‘better than well’ approach to humanity. Transhumanists believe that through judicious choices and technoscientific progress, humankind can transcend 285

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its present conditions and obtain healthier, happier and longer, possibly infinite life spans. While some transhumanists restrict their hopes to the promise of biotechnology, many . . . see robotics and artificial intelligence as the keys to a transcendent future. In doing so, they incorporate the apocalyptic categories of ancient Judaism and Christianity into a modern worldview buttressed by the successes of twentieth and twentyfirst century technology. 2010: pp. 13, 14 Others, like anthropologist Abou Farman, propose that transhumanist immortality initiatives should be understood as a product of and response to secularism, rather than an appropriation of Judeo-Christian beliefs. He writes: In a world where secular knowledge has diminished the place and importance of humans in the universe, the existential fragility of being human is heightened in particular ways, through particular dynamics and anxieties. Part of the appeal of the immortalist imaginary to immortalists turns out to be related to the possibility of addressing such existential issues without giving up, in their own reckoning, on the hard premises of a scientific approach- simply put, without giving up on a materialist or physicalist approach. 2012a: p. 1613 Lastly, whether we understand transhumanist immortality initiatives as part of a religious endeavor or a secular one, their efforts to live forever in avatar form suggest that certain human impulses may remain constant over time and that social scientists should pay as much attention to that which stays the same, as to that which changes. Like countless groups that have come before them, transhumanists express a powerful need to overcome the frailty of the body and resist the finality of death. As O’Connell reflected, after meeting several of the key figures who are spearheading efforts to achieve immortality through the technology of mind uploading, ‘what really interested’ him about the transhumanist idea of mind cloning was: not how strange and far-fetched it seemed (though it tickled those boxes resolutely enough), but rather how fundamentally identifiable it was, how universal. . . . Because there was something, in the end, paradoxically and definitively human in this desire for liberation from human form. 2017: p. 50 Thus, I want to conclude this chapter by suggesting that despite their attempts to usher in a profoundly altered ‘post-human’ future, the transhumanist attempt to use science and technology to live forever in avatar form is ultimately a classically human endeavor. Key words: ancestorhood, immortality, conceptions of the afterlife, transhumanism, religion, science, technology

Notes 1 In a chapter on ‘Secularization and the Terror of Death’ Tony Walter (1996) provides an extensive review of this literature.

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From ancestors to avatars 2 As Hageman and Hill (2016: p. 5) point out, within the anthropological literature, there is some discrepancy as to how ancestors should be defined. In this chapter I follow Couderec and Sillander. They opt for a ‘broader understanding of the ancestor concept,’ and define ancestors as: people who live on in memory of individuals, groups, or entire societies through what they have transmitted to them. They are beings from whom people trace genealogical or social ancestry, who stand in a constitutive relationship to them as influential predecessors without whom they would not quite be what they are or exist at all.They are important by in some fundamental sense enabling the existence of their Successors. (2012: p. 12). 3 See for instance, Gluckman, 1937; Radcliffe-Brown, 1945; Fortes, 1961: p. 964; Goody, 1962; Tatje and Hsu, 1969; Bloch, 1971; Hageman and Hill, 2016. 4 This concern with maintaining the proper generational succession occurs among the Tallensi, and we find similar ideas and practices in Borneo. See Fortes, 1965; Sillander, 2012. 5 See for instance, Munn, 1970; Bloch, 1971; Kahn, 1990; Basso, 1996; Stewart and Strathern, 2005; Keen, 2006; Retsikas, 2007. 6 Taken from: www.minduploading.org. ‘Mind Uploading: Realizing the Goal of Substrate Independent Minds.’ 2015. Retrieved July 2017. 7 Taken from the 2045 Social Initiative website: http://2045.com/ideology. 8 This observation has been made by other scholars writing about transhumanists. For instance, in an article on new space entrepreneurs, many of whom identify with the transhumanist movement, David Valentine (2012) argues that new space entrepreneurs are deeply committed to the idea of securing a human existence into the ‘deep future’ and that anthropologists need to take their ‘cosmological visions’ as seriously as their attempts to exploit new frontiers for profit. Abou Farman makes a similar point in his study of American Immortalists who are working to develop the technologies for immortal life and suggests that they are indeed engaged in a project of ‘cosmic’ self-making. He writes, ‘[t]he reckoning of life on a cosmic scale, the everyday grappling with a larger existential purpose, is an emergent discipline around which new practices and affects are being formed, building what I call a cosmic self ’ (2012b: p. 1082). 9 For other transhumanist writings on the mind as information pattern, see: Minsky, 1985; Kurzweil, 2005; Hayworth, 2010; La Torra, 2011; Koene, 2013; Merkle, 2013; Wiley, 2014; 2015. 10 For a discussion of transhumanists who anticipate this see Geraci (2010: p. 88). 11 See Friend (2017). 12 Hava Tirosh-Samuelson highlights the religious dimension of transhumanism. She argues that transhumanism ‘should be seen as a secularist faith: transhumanism secularizes traditional religious themes, concerns, and goals, while endowing technology with religious significance. Science-Religion Studies is the most appropriate context to explore the cultural significance of transhumanism’ (2012: p. 710). 13 Farman further states: Today, it seems impossible to discuss any notion of immortality or the afterlife separately from religion, for the secular has pushed all notions of soul or survival beyond the body into a religious domain.That is why Immortalists, reviving a physical notion of immortality, are constantly caught in the secular-religious conundrum, as we’ll see later.Yet it is possible to draw a genealogical line that is not reducible to religion alone, from a platonic notion to the later Christian concept of an immortal soul to psychology and its subconscious to contemporary concepts of self, and mind which, especially through cognitive science and artificial intelligence, are attempting to ground the mind in a purely materialist basis, as the informatics of biochemical workings of the brain.

2012a: pp. 37–38

Further reading Hageman, J. and Hill, E. (eds). (2016) The Archeology of Ancestors: Death, Memory, and Veneration. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. This volume provides an overview of the importance and veneration of ancestors in societies past and present. Walter, T. (1996) The Eclipse of Eternity: A Sociology of the Afterlife. London: Macmillan Press.

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Jenny Huberman This book explores changing conceptions of the afterlife and examines how and why modern societies have come to question and in some cases reject the idea of an eternal afterlife. Robben, A. (ed). (2004) Death, Mourning, and Burial: A Cross-Cultural Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. This volume provides a collection of essays exploring mortuary rituals and the social construction of death and the afterlife across a range of societies. Farman, A. (2012a) Secular Immortal. PhD dissertation, City University of New York. This doctoral thesis provides an ethnographic study of the Immortalist movement in the United States, and it examines the role that transhumanist have played in contemporary efforts to achieve immortality through techno-scientific means. More, M. and Vita-More, N. (eds). (2013) The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science,Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. This edited volume provides a collection of essays on the values, beliefs, and agendas of the contemporary transhumanist movement.

Bibliography Basso, K. (1996) Wisdom Sits in Place: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Bauman, Z. (1992) Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bloch, M. (1971) Placing the Dead: Tombs, Ancestral Villages, and Kinship Organization in Madagascar. London: Seminar Press. Cannell, F. (2011) ‘English Ancestors: The Moral Possibilities of Popular Genealogy,’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 17(3), pp. 462–480. Conklin, B. (2004) ‘Thus Are Our Bodies, thus Was Our Custom’: Mortuary Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society,’ in: Robben, A. (ed). Death, Mourning, and Burial: A Cross-cultural Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 238–262. Couderec, P. and Sillander, K. (2012) ‘Introduction,’ in: Couderc, P. and Sillander, K. (eds). Ancestors in Borneo Societies: Death,Transformation, and Social Immortality. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, pp. 1–61. Dernbach, K. (2005) ‘Spirits of the Hearafter: Death, Funerary Possession, and the Afterlife in Chuuk, Micronesia,’ Ethnology, 44(2), pp. 99–123. Farman, A. (2012a) Secular Immortal. PhD dissertation, City University of New York. Farman, A. (2012b) ‘Re-enchantment Cosmologies: Mastery and Obsolescence in an Intelligent Universe,’ Anthropological Quarterly, 85(4), pp. 1069–1088. Farman, A. (2014) ‘Informatic Selves,’ in: Mohacsi, G. (ed). Ecologies of Care: Innovations Through Technologies, Collectives and the Senses. Osaka: Osaka University Press, pp. 273–282 Fortes, M. (1961) ‘Pietas in Ancestor Worship,’ The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 91(2), pp. 166–191. Fortes, M. (1965) ‘Some Reflections on Ancestor Worship in Africa,’ in: Fortes, M. and Deieterlen, G. (eds). African Systems of Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 122–142. Friend, T. (2017) ‘The God Pill: Silicon Valley’s Quest for Eternal Life,’ The New Yorker, April 3, pp. 54–67. Gell, A. (1992) The Anthropology of Time. Oxford: Berg Press. Geraci, R. (2010) Apocalyptic AI:Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gluckman, M. (1937) ‘Mortuary Customs and the Belief in Survival after Death among the SouthEasterBantu,’ Bantu Studies, 11(2), pp. 117–136. Goertzel, B. (2009) ‘AI and What to Do About it,’ Forbes, 22 June [online]. Available at: www.forbes. com/2009/06/22/ai-financial-advice-opinions-contributors-artificial-intelligence-09-goertzel.html. [Accessed 22 April 2017]. Goertzel, B. (2010) A Cosmist Manifesto: Practical Philosophy for a Posthuman Age. Humanity Plus Press under a Creative Commons License. Goody, J. (1962) Death, Property and the Ancestors: A Study of the Mortuary Customs of the Lodagaa of West Africa. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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From ancestors to avatars Hageman, J. and Hill, E. (2016) ‘Leveraging the Dead:The Ethnography of Ancestors’, in: Hill, E. and Hageman, J. (eds). The Archeology of Ancestors: Death, Memory, and Veneration. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, pp. 3–41. Harrison, R. P. (2003) The Dominion of the Dead. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hasu, P. (2009) ‘For Ancestors and God: Rituals of Sacrifice among the Chagga of Tanzania,’ Ethnology, 48(3), pp. 195–213. Hayworth, K. (2010) ‘Killed by Bad Philosophy,’ The Brain Preservation Foundation. January [online weblog]. Available at: www.brainpreservation.org/content-2/killed-bad-philosophy. [Accessed 22 April 2017]. Hertz. R. (1960 [1907]) ‘A Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representation of Death,’ in: Death and the Right Hand.Translated by R. Needham and C. Needham. Glencoe, IL:The Free Press, pp. 27–86 and 117–154. Kahn, M. (1990) ‘Stone-Faced Ancestors: The Spatial Anchoring of Myth in Wamira, Papua New Guinea,’ Ethnology, 29(1), pp. 51–66. Keen, I. (2006) ‘Ancestors, Magic, and Exchange in Yolngu Doctrines: Extensions of the Person in time and Space,’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 12, pp. 515–530. Keesing, R. (1970) ‘Shrines, Ancestors, and Cognatic Descent:The Kwaio and Tallensi,’ American Anthropologist, 72(4), pp. 755–775. Keightly, D. (2004) ‘The Making of Ancestors: Late Shang Religion and its Legacy,’ in: Lagerwey, J. (ed). Religion and Chinese Society: Volume I: Ancient and Medieval China. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, pp. 3–63. Koene, R. (2013) ‘Uploading to Substrate-Independent Minds,’ in: More, M. and Vita-More, N. (eds). The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 156–156. Kurzweil, R. (2005) The Singularity Is Near:When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Penguin Books. La Torra, M. (2011) ‘Transhumanism: Threat or Menace? A Response to Andrew Picerking,’ in: Hansell, G. and Grassie, W. (eds). H+/-Transhumanism and its Critics. Philadelphia: Metanexus Institute, pp. 205–211. Lincoln, B. (1989) Discourse and the Construction of Society. New York: Oxford University Press. McAnany, P. A. (2016) The archaeology of ancestors: death, memory, and veneration. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Marcoux, J. (2001) ‘The “Casser Masison” Ritual: Constructing the Self by Emptying the Home,’ Journal of Material Culture, 6(2), pp. 213–235. Merkle, R. (2013) ‘Uploading,’ in: More, M. and Vita-More, N. (eds). The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on The Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, pp. 157–164. Metcalf, P. and Huntington, R. (1991) Celebrations of Death:The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Minsky, M. (1985) The Society of Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster Press. Moravec, H., (1988) Mind children: The future of robot and human intelligence. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. More, M. (2013) ‘The Philosophy of Transhumanism,’ in: More, M. and Vita-More, N. (eds). The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 1–17. More, M. and Vita-More, N. (2013) ‘Roots and Core Themes,’ in: More, M. and Vita-More, N. (eds). The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 1, 2. Munn, N. (1970) ‘The Transformation of Subjects into Objects in Walbiri and Pitjantjatjara Myth,’ in: Berndt, R. (ed). Australian Aboriginal Anthropology: Modern Studies in the Social Anthropology of the Australian Aborgines. Nedlands: University of Western Australia Pressm, pp. 141–163. Newell, W. (1976) ‘Good and Bad Ancestors,’ in: Newell, W. H. (ed). Ancestors. Paris: Mouton Publishers, pp. 17–28. O’Connell, M. (2017) How to Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death. London: Granta. Parrott, F. (2011) ‘Death, Memory and Collecting: Creating the Conditions for Ancestralisation in South London Households,’ in: Byrne, S., Clarke, A., Harrison, R. and Torrence, R. (eds). Unpacking the Collection: Networks of Material and Social Agency in the Museum. New York: Springer-Verlag, pp. 289–305.

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Jenny Huberman Prisco, G. (2013) ‘Transcendent Engineering,’ in: More, M. and Vita-More, N. (eds). The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 234–240. Radcliffe-Brown. A. R. (1945) ‘Religion and Society,’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 75(1/2), pp. 33–43. Rasmussen, S. (2000) ‘Alms, Elders, and Ancestors: The Spirit of the Gift among the TUAREG,’ Ethnology, 39(1), pp. 15–38. Retsikas, K. (2007) ‘Being and Place: Movement, Ancestors, and Personhood in East Java, Indonesia,’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13, pp. 969–986. Rothblatt, M. (2013) ‘Mind Is Deeper than Matter: Transgenderism, Transhumanism, and the Freedom of Form,’ in: More, M. and Vita-More, N. (eds). The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science,Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future. Malden, MA:Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 317–326. Rothblatt, M. (2014) Virtually Human:The Promise and the Peril of Digital Immortality. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Shweder, R. and Bourne, E. (1984) ‘Does the Concept of the Person Vary Cross-Culturally?’ in: Shweder, R. and LeVine, R. (eds). Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 158–199. Sillander, K. (2012) ‘Ancestors as Sources of Authority and Potency among the Bentian of East Kalimantan,’ in: Couderc, P. and Sillander, K. (eds). Ancestors in Borneo Societies: Death,Transformation, and Social Immortality. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, pp. 62–113. Stewart, P. and Strathern, A. (2005) ‘Cosmology, Resources, and Landscape: Agencies of the Dead and the Living in Duna, Papua New Guinea,’ Ethnology, 44(1), pp. 35–47. Tatje,T. and Hsu, F. (1969) ‘Variations in Ancestor Worship Beliefs and their Relation to Kinship,’ Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 25(2), pp. 153–172. Tirosh-Samuelson, H. (2012) ‘Transhumanism as Secularist Faith,’ Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, 47(4), pp. 710–734. Valentine, D. (2012) ‘Exit strategy: Profit, Cosmology, and the Future of Humans in Space,’ Anthropological Quarterly, 85(4), pp. 1045–1067. Vitebsky, P. (1993) Dialogues with the Dead: The Discussion of Mortality among the Sora of Eastern India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walter, T. (1996) The Eclipse of Eternity: A Sociology of the Afterlife. London: Macmillan Press. Wiley, K. (2014) A Taxonomy and Metaphysics of Mind-uploading. Seattle: Humanity+ Press. Wiley, K. (2015) ‘Mind Uploading and the Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything,’ Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology, 20 July 2015 [online]. Available at: http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/ wiley20150720. [Accessed 22 April 2017].

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PART VI

Material corpses and imagined afterlives around the world

23 FROM THE UNDERWORLD OF YAMA TO THE ISLAND OF GEMS Concepts of afterlife in Hinduism June McDaniel

1 Introduction The term ‘Hinduism’ covers a wide variety of systems of belief and practice. It includes such perspectives as monotheism, dualism, polytheism, non-theism, henotheism, monism, and pantheism. Its ideas of death and afterlife are thus equally varied. The earliest known religious system in India was associated with the Aryan people of India, and the writings of the Vedas (from about 1500 bce on). These Sanskrit texts described death as the time when the soul left the physical body and went to the ancestor world (the pitriloka). One funeral hymn tells the soul not to linger, but rather to follow the ancient paths to the land of the fathers, and unite with Yama, lord of the dead, to gain the rewards of good deeds and sacrifices (RV 10.14:7–8). Another asks Agni, god of fire, to lead the soul to Yama, the fathers, and the heavens, where the person can become an ancestor. His eyes go to the sun, his breath to the wind, his limbs to the plants (RV 10.16:3). The general goal is a long life, and no more rebirth, which is understood as no more re-death. The ritual of cremation allows the soul to escape from the body and continue on its way. The soul is carried by Agni, escorted by Savitur, protected by Pusan, and taken to the land of the gods or to the fathers.

2  Re-death and reincarnation The Brahmana commentaries on the Vedas emphasize the problem of ‘re-death’ (punarmrityu). Dying once is unpleasant enough, but having to die over and over again is something one would wish to escape. Even the gods feared death, but they performed the rituals that allowed them to become immortal and left ‘re-death’ to humanity (Satapatha Brahmana, 10.4:1–10). The highest goal of Vedic religious ritual was to bring immortality. The most well-known Vedic commentaries are the Upanishads (from about 1000 bce on), and many of these writings saw death in a more positive light. Escape from rebirth and redeath meant escaping from ignorance and desire, and the goal changed to liberation from the limits

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of life and death. Meditation, asceticism, and jnana yoga led to a higher good than the ancestor worlds or the heavens of the Vedic gods. In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (6.2:15) and the Chandogya Upanishad (10: 1–6), those who dwell in the dark ancestor world (pitriloka) are contrasted with those who go to the bright heavens of the gods (devaloka). But the heavens are coming to be understood as having other qualities, such as infinite awareness or brahman, the being, consciousness, and bliss which is the source of all things. In the Upanishads we first hear details of enlightenment and reincarnation. Moksha is liberation from both life and death, a state of ultimate freedom. It is attained by the atman, the eternal aspect of the self, which can merge with brahman as a drop of water merges into the ocean (or recognizes that the whole ocean has always existed within the drop). However, most souls are trapped in the worlds of death and rebirth (samsara), in the illusory worlds influenced by the good and bad karma which propel the soul into rebirth. It is only with the realization of brahman that the soul can break the cycle of rebirth.

3 Liberation In the Katha Upanishad, it is Yama himself who explains liberation to the boy Nachiketas. When his father offered an inferior cow for a sacrifice, his son Nachiketas offered himself for the ritual instead. His father was annoyed and said that he gives him to death, and the son went off to look for Yama. When he arrived at the realm of the dead, Yama was away, and the boy had to wait three days. This was a breach of proper hospitality, so when Yama returned he offered the boy three wishes. Nachiketas’ first wish was a return to the land of the living, which Yama agreed to guarantee. His second wish was knowledge of immortality through the fire sacrifice.Yama gave an explanation of Vedic rituals which led to immortality, focusing on creating a spiritual body for the worlds of the ancestors or the gods. For the third wish, Nachiketas asked for the secret of the self that transcends death.Yama tried to avoid answering the question, offering Nachiketas wealth, children, and long life instead. But Yama finally answered the question. He spoke of the atman, the eternal and unchanging self that is the inner reality of each individual. It is invisible and could not be sensed, but could be known.This self is neither born nor dies, but is beyond birth and death. It is veiled by layers of embodiment, and by penetrating these, the ultimate self is revealed. In the Upanishads and later Advaita Vedanta, the soul is described as going from one body to another like a caterpillar going from one leaf to another. It is purified from life to life, and it gains progressively better forms during this process, as gold is purified. We have images of the soul as a spark from a giant fire, and a drop of water in the ocean of consciousness.The best death would be as a liberated person or jivanmukta. Such a person has realized his or her deeper self or atman, and merged with brahman, the ocean of consciousness. The process of gaining liberation or moksha would be accompanied by visions of light, during life or at the moment of death. Death is complex in Upanishadic or Vedanta philosophy, for several of the texts speak of the person having many sheaths (koshas) and bodies (sariras). These have been compared to layers of an onion. According to the model of the three bodies, the outermost self is the physical body (sthula-sarira), and there are inner layers that follow, including the subtle body which focuses on thoughts and feelings (suksma-sarira), and the causal body with its karmic seeds (karana-sarira). According to the model of five sheaths in the Taittiriya Upanishad, we have the physical or food body (annamayakosha), the vital body (pranamayakosha), the mind body (manomayakosha), and the body of the intellect or wisdom (vijanamayakosha), as well as the bliss body (anandamayakosha) which surround the atman. At death, the physical body drops away, but the soul may still travel with the other bodies.

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4  Karma and reincarnation There are different models of reincarnation. In some models it is controlled by karma but includes rebirth in other species, while in others, reincarnation is an evolutionary process in which simple forms of consciousness gain greater awareness, eventually reaching infinite consciousness. Reincarnation is thus teleological. Karma continues to exist within the soul over the process of birth, death, and rebirth, popularly known as samsara. It was often seen in a negative fashion, symbolized as a web, a wheel, a prison, or a trap for human beings. Liberation or moksha was understood to allow the soul to escape the process of samsara, and attain perfection and selfrealization. In the Upanishads, such liberation came primarily through wisdom, especially the realization that the deepest level of self, or atman, was equivalent to the universal awareness or brahman. This equation was especially popular in the Upanishadic philosophy known as Advaita Vedanta. We see such new conceptual additions in this philosophy as atman and brahman, and the two forms of brahman, which are nirguna (brahman without form, an understanding of god as pure consciousness or energy) and saguna (brahman with form, as a deity, and generally one possessing human qualities). Brahman can be experienced as sat chit ananda, or being, consciousness, and bliss. One’s next life is dependent upon one’s karma, the results of one’s deeds.The role of karma in death and rebirth is elaborated in the dharmashastras or law texts. These books develop theories of the different sub-types of karma which influence the direction and situation of rebirth.These are primarily theoretical texts, and they discuss the influences of karma on rebirth and rewards and punishments for deeds. There are many categorizations of karma, but the most widespread understanding includes three types. Sanchita is the karma accumulated over lifetimes. From this vast collection of sanchita karma, a small amount is experienced in one lifetime.This set of karmas, which will be exhausted only on their seeds being ripened (or fully understood) is known as prarabdha karma. Prarabdha karma is the portion of accumulated karma that has ‘ripened’ and appears in the present life. Kriyamana is everything that we produce in the current life. All kriyamana karmas flow in to sanchita karma and consequently shape our future. Thus the concept of karma is not a fatalistic one; we are continually experiencing past karma and creating future karma. The karmas still associated with the soul will influence the processes of death and rebirth. In more popular Hinduism, epics like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana give stories of folk beliefs about the afterlife, as well as Hindu philosophy and theology. In the Bhagavad Gita section of the Mahabharata, the god Krishna explains various approaches to life and death. He tells Arjuna not to grieve for those he loves, for bodies may perish, but the soul is enduring and indestructible (2:18). ‘Weapons do not hurt the self, nor does fire burn it’ (2:23). The goal is brahman, and people who act without egotism and are not attached to the fruits of their actions can reach that state and be at peace (2:72). As a person takes off his old clothes and puts on new ones, so souls can take on new bodies. However, Krishna also notes that there are different afterlives for people who believe differently: ‘Those who choose gods go to the gods; those who choose ancestors go to the ancestors. Those who honor the ghosts go to the ghosts, but those who sacrifice to me go to me’ (9:25). In chapter nine of the Gita, Krishna reveals his universal form, as the supreme god of life and death. He showed that he had all gods of creation and all gods of destruction within himself. Still, Krishna stated that the person who loves him shall not perish (9:33). This brings in the devotion to the god, or bhakti, as another way of overcoming death, separate from Vedic ritual and Upanishadic wisdom.

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5  Hindu texts and understandings of death The epics and puranas include many popular stories. Their focus is not upon the ultimate religious goal, but rather on the intermediate worlds. They describe heaven (svarga) and hell (naraka). Heaven is where the gods dwell, and each major god has his or her own heaven. People can visit the heavens because of their good karma, but they cannot stay – heaven is a temporary place for human beings. So are the temporary hell worlds, which are places for punishment and atonement. Yama rules over the sinners being punished. The Garuda Purana (2.3:3) states that there are thousands of hells, and these focus upon specific sins. Gods and others can see the tortures that souls will undergo there until they are purified. Puranas also contain folk stories about the souls of the dead. Those who cannot reach any of the accepted afterlife worlds, and have not reincarnated, may stay on earth after their deaths to haunt their families and villages. Each region of India has its own set of stories about wandering ghosts and spirits. Bhutas and pretas have generally had inauspicious deaths, by murder or execution or suicide, and they are bound to this world. Tamil Nadu has the pey, Gujarat has the chir abatti, and Nepal has the bayyu. The churel is the ghost of a woman who dies in childbirth or is killed by her in-laws, while the begho bhoot is the ghost of a person eaten by a tiger. The brahmadaitya is a kindly Brahmin ghost who wears a dhoti, while the mamdo bhuta is a Muslim ghost, and the daini may be the ghost of a dead witch, or the wandering soul of a living witch. Ghosts are bound by unfulfilled desires, and religious specialists (such as the ojha or gunin) can act as exorcists to find out these desires and try to fulfill them. When their desires are fulfilled, angry ghosts may be transformed by worship and respect into local village deities – gramadevatas and gramadevis. In folk tales, the soul could become a wandering ghost (preta), or be taken by Yama, lord of death, who grabs the soul at the end of life and drags it into the underworld.There it goes before the court of Yama in his role as Dharmaraj, lord of dharma or cosmic order, to be judged on his actions.Yama comes to pull out the soul at death with his noose, accompanied by his two dogs and riding on his water buffalo. He takes the soul to the appropriate section of Naraka, the hell worlds, or he can guide the soul up to Swarga or heaven if it is suitable. Souls become wandering ghosts when the proper funeral rites are not followed. From the Vedic period on, children have been creating afterlife bodies for their parents. In the Shraddha rites, the surviving child offers the priest a rice ball, which symbolically becomes the soul’s head in the afterlife. Sesame seeds and ghee were added for strength and nutrition in the ritual of sapindi-karana. More rice balls were added as limbs and other parts of the body. By the tenth day of this ritual, the body was complete, and the soul was on its way to becoming an ancestor. In Indian tradition, there are two understandings of the moment of death. One is the moment of physical death, when the body dies. The other is the time of cremation, and more specifically the kapala kriya – the ritual midway through the cremation, when the chief mourner cracks open the skull of the burnt corpse with a staff, to release the prana or vital breath. This is when the soul leaves the body. There is thus a distinction between physical death of the body and ritual death of the soul. Death impurity begins at the release of this prana, and the sraddha rite of commemoration is performed on the anniversary of the burning of the body, not of the person’s death. According to the folk tradition of paraloka vidya, the bonds that link the soul and body are dissolved at the moment of death. Mantras should be chanted at the cremation ground to encourage the vital energies (pranas) to leave the body, and the five bodily elements to return to their origins. The soul hovers around familiar places in disembodied form for up to ten days. When the pranas are withdrawn from the body into the soul (jiva), the person perceives the 296

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desires and memories (vasanas) which are normally unconscious.These are traditionally personified as Chitragupta (‘secret pictures’), the messenger of Yama, lord of death. On the eleventh day, the soul begins its journey to Yama’s world. It can be strengthened by the rituals performed for the soul by relatives on earth. The epics and puranas also begin the rise of the devotional or bhakti traditions, in which people are dedicated to specific gods. Some of the major deities are Vishnu (and his avatar forms), Shiva, and Devi. In the approach of bhakti, devotion leads to rebirth in heaven of god, reached through love, good deeds, ritual worship or puja, and emotional surrender to the deity. God is lord (ishvara), in some schools appearing to humanity in avatar form. There is generally cyclical rebirth until the soul attains the heaven of the deity (such as Shiva’s heaven of Kailash,Vishnu’s heaven of Vaikuntha, Krishna’s heaven of Vrindavana, and the Devi’s heaven of Manidvipa).With the rise of bhakti or devotional religion, there were new possibilities for the soul. Love of a god or goddess could change what happened at the moment of death. Chanting the name of the god, or visualization of divine images or symbols (such as yantras), could bring the deity to the dying soul. Among Vaishnavas, the name of Rama or Narayana acted as a taraka mantra, which helps in crossing the ocean of samsara, and frees the soul from rebirth. With bhakti or devotional Hinduism, the dualistic or saguna perspective became popular.The soul was no longer just a spark or a droplet returning to the whole. Instead, it was an individual rising to enter a heaven, guided by a deity who could come to the person at the moment of death. For Vaishnavas, those who worship the god Vishnu, the deity might come to take the person to his eternal heaven of Vaikuntha or Vrindavana, or send his messengers to rescue the soul from danger at death.There are many stories of the god Vishnu fighting Yama, lord of death, for the souls of his devotees. As an example, we have the story of Ajamila, described in the sixth book of the Bhagavata Purana, a major sacred text of Vaishnavism. In this story, the king Parikshit and his guru Sukadev discuss the life of a Brahmin named Ajamila. He had lived a pious life until he chanced upon a couple having passionate sex. The image filled his mind, and he could no longer concentrate on prayer and meditation. He left his wife and went to live with a prostitute, and he had children with her, living by robbery and fraud. On his deathbed he called to his favorite son, Narayana (Narayana is also a name of the god Vishnu). As he died, the messengers of Yama, lord of death, arrived with their nooses to drag his soul away to the underworld. But when the servants of Vishnu, the Vishnudutas, heard him call on Narayana at the moment of death, they also came to the dying man. These beautiful servants of Vishnu demanded Ajamila’s soul from the fearful and twisted servants of Yama, and this begins a long discussion in the text about good and evil behavior, and the nature of the soul. Yama’s dark messengers argued that the man had lived a sinful life and deserved to be punished. But Vishnu’s golden messengers argued that chanting the name of god at the moment of death atoned for the sins of millions of births. By calling the name of god on his deathbed, Ajamila left behind all of his sins. Calling the name of god burns sins to ashes, as fire burns dry grass; it is like medicine, which works even if it is used by an ignorant person. Yama’s messengers were intimidated by this argument and left.Vishnu’s messengers had mercy on Ajamila and allowed him to return to life. This vision that Ajamila saw on his deathbed changed his life. He realized the extent of his bad behavior and vowed never again to act in that way. He became a yogi, devoting himself to meditation.When he died later on, he had another vision of the golden messengers of Vishnu, and he consciously chose to die. He went with them to the heaven of Vishnu, where he was welcomed. The Bhagavata Purana also describes five styles of possibleVaishnava afterlife in heaven.According to the salokya perspective, the soul will live in the same area or world as Vishnu/Narayana. In the sarsti form of afterlife, the soul acquires the same wealth or power as the god. In sarupya, the 297

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soul will take on the same form as the god, thus reflecting the image of god. According to samipya, the soul becomes a personal friend of Vishnu and stays near him as a companion. According to sayujya, the liberation attained by yogis and followers of Vedanta, the soul becomes one with the light of the god, or he becomes one with the god by losing all individuality. But the highest goal is to become a servant or beloved of the god in the form of Krishna in the heavenly Vrindavana.

6  Deities, death, and afterlives There are also puranas and poems dedicated to the god Shiva. He is a god of death and transcendence, often linked with the Vedic god Rudra, the storm god associated with destruction. However, Shiva is also the god of reincarnation, since in Hinduism death is believed to be a necessary step for rebirth. Shiva has different aspects that appear at different times. He is often depicted as the destroyer, and will appear as a naked ascetic, encircled with serpents and necklaces of skulls. Sometimes Shiva wanders into burning grounds, smears his body with ash and dances in the light of the funeral pyres, reminding all about the transitory nature of material things. Another common form is that of Shiva Nataraja, engaged in a cosmic dance. It is believed that the energy from this dance sustains the cosmos, and when Shiva is finished with this dance, this universe will end and a new one will begin. In his role as a bhakti deity, Shiva takes his disciples to his heaven of Kailash. According to one story, when a thief was scratched on the forehead by a dog, who accidentally made the three symbolic lines of Shiva’s trident on his forehead, he was claimed by Shiva and went to his heaven. There is a Mt. Kailash on earth, which is understood to have a mystical relationship with Shiva’s celestial Kailash, and is thus an important Shaivite pilgrimage locale. Shiva’s heaven is said from one perspective to have clouds and mountains, and a palace where Shiva is in eternal meditation, and from another view, to shine like gold and be as transparent as crystal. Kali is a pan-Indian goddess, associated with death and rebirth, and she is worshiped by a variety of different castes and tribes. She ranges from being a folk village goddess who protects a small area, and an ancestress who grants boons, to a tantric and yogic goddess who gives liberation to her devotees, and a loving mother who gives them protection (as Raksha Kali) and entrance to her heaven, holding them like children upon her lap. Chanting her name can lead to union with brahman, for one of Kali’s tantric names is Kaivalya-dayini, giver of liberation. Kali is a savioress, whether by her compassion to bhaktas or by her giving liberation to yogis and tantrikas. We see this liberating role of Kali in the life of the siddha/saint Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, where the goddess appeared to him in his famous vision of brahman as an ocean of consciousness. While the goddess Kali traditionally threatens order and stability, she also represents a transcendent order, beyond dharma and the social expectations of an earthly life. In the texts she is ugly, with black and emaciated body, matted hair and snakes, but in her statues and posters she is often young and beautiful, with flirtatious eyes, large breasts, a narrow waist, and a big smile. She may be deep-blue, sky-blue, or even white – all are beneficent and auspicious forms of the goddess. Informants say that this beautiful form is her real and inner form, with the ugly image only to frighten the unworthy and the evil. If you are her enemy or do not respect her sufficiently, the frightening black Kali of the burning ground will destroy you. But if you can get her as an ally, the black Kali will be your protector when you go to a new rebirth. If you are truly devoted, she becomes the beautiful blue or white Kali, whose graceful form will come to you at the time of your death, and she will smile lovingly as she takes you to Kailash (Shiva’s heaven) or Manidvipa (the Island of Jewels) to dwell on her lap forever. As a devotional goddess, Kali is Mother of the Universe, and the beloved parent of Shakta poets like Ramprasad Sen. She is described with love, and her dark side is justified by the 298

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presence of death in nature – Kali represents what is true, not what people would like to see. She is described as loving, sweet, and compassionate in her poetry, but she is also capable of saving her devotees from their own karma, sweeping them out of the ghostly worlds between incarnations and taking them to her paradise. In West Bengal, there are types of bhakti which have afterlives in which all souls are transformed at death and must become female. We shall look at two of them here. In Gaudiya Vaishavism, the ideal afterlife state is to be in the heavenly Vrindavana, with the divine couple Krishna and Radha. The worshipper is dedicated to the couple, through both the physical body (sadhaka rupa) and the spiritual body (siddha rupa). In the physical body, the devotee chants, dances, and gives offerings. The emotions of pure love (prema) and the desire to serve create a special form of inner body, a handmaiden or friend of Radha, called a manjari.The devotee visualizes this body as about 13 years old, beautiful and delicate, wearing a special color of sari and performing a special service for Krishna and Radha. As a part of this ritual practice of manjari sadhana, the worshipper memorizes the layout of the heavenly town, and the couple’s activities during the day. When the practitioner dies, his spiritual body remains, to spend eternity in the heavenly Vrindavana. We may note that this visualization of an inner female body is performed almost exclusively by men. Another heaven exclusively for women is found in Bengali Shaktism, in the Srimad Devi Bhagavata Purana. It describes the heaven of the goddess as only open to women. During worship on earth, the devotee should worship all people as forms of the goddess. When he dies, and goes to the Devi’s heaven of Manidvipa or the Island of Gems, his spiritual body must be a female one to echo the form of the goddess. It is a beautiful heaven, shining with the light of a million suns. Indeed, the text mentions that the great Hindu gods Brahma,Vishnu, and Shiva came to visit the goddess’ paradise. In order to enter, they had to take on female form.They were accepted as attendants of the goddess by her other handmaidens, and Shiva begged the goddess never to return his masculine form. He wished to serve the goddess as a woman forever.

7  Hindu corpse rituals The Hindu practice of tantra is perhaps most well known for its focus upon rituals of sexuality and death. While other regional forms of tantra in India are famed for their real or imagined sexual rituals, the Bengali style of Shakta or goddess-focused tantra is perhaps most marked by its emphasis on death. Sava-sadhana, or the ritual practice of sitting on a corpse, is one of its most important rituals. For many practitioners, it is the single most important ritual in Shaktism or goddess worship. The corpse ritual combines the three types of Bengali Shaktism: folk, tantric, and bhakti. From the folk perspective, the power of the corpse ritual enhances life on earth. Challenging death leads to immortality, which is defined as amrta, non-death, a situation implying long life, wealth, and power. From the yogic or tantric perspective, rituals in the burning ground lead to detachment from the physical world, conquering the fear of death, and union with a transcendent ground, as Shiva or Shakti or brahman. From the devotional or bhakti perspective, the ritual brings a loving relationship with a deity who has a form and personality, and gives salvation by grace. All of these are present in the sava-sadhana rite. The typical sava-sadhana practice is performed on a new moon night (or the eighth or fourteenth day of the moon). The practitioner should go to a burning ground or some other lonely spot (a deserted house, a river side, under a bilva tree, or on a hill). He (or she) should bring a corpse, young and attractive, of a person who died recently. The body is washed and placed on a blanket, deer, or tiger skin. The practitioner should worship it, and then sit on the corpse and 299

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contemplate the god or goddess. He or she will experience fearful images and sounds, as well as temptations, but he must remain emotionally detached – or else he may go insane. If he is successful, he may gain the power to use a mantra (mantrasiddhi), or other supernatural powers, or have a vision of the goddess. She may appear to possess the corpse, or appear before the practitioner as a beautiful woman, a little girl, or a great goddess in the sky. In Shakta tantra, the corpse ritual is part of the tantric path known as vamacara (the path of the left or reverse practice) or kulacara (the path of a family group or religious lineage). The goal is loosening the person from the bonds of samsara – he or she is no longer attached, neither hates nor fears, is ashamed of nothing, and has gone beyond all traditional notions of good and evil. The practitioner is understood to have passed through the lowest stage of pasubhava, the animal stage, where the person conforms to social conventions and obeys rules without question. The middle stage of virabhava is when one acts as a hero. It has the person breaking traditional rules, to go beyond ordinary laws and gain insight into the infinity which exists beyond ordinary social conventions. One who attains this state is considered to be in the highest state of divyabhava, beyond purity and impurity. It is a radical breaking of attachment, with both the world of samsara and traditional morality. The devotional approach to the corpse ritual interprets the practice to reflect divine love, and evidence of one’s passion and dedication to the goddess. Indeed, the goddess is herself often seated on a corpse in her iconography. The god Shiva without his consort Shakti is said to be a corpse, and the goddess (usually in the form of Kali) may stand over him or sit upon him. The practitioner meditates upon Shakti who is visualized in the heart lotus. According to Shakta folklore, it is the devotion of the practitioner which brings the goddess down to him. He is so passionate that he is willing to risk the dangers of the burning ground, its ghosts and demons and jackals, and potential madness, to bring the goddess to him. She may enter his heart, or she may enter the corpse when it becomes a dwelling place (murti) for the goddess. It may begin speaking affectionately (or sometimes terrifyingly) to the devotee. When the devotee asks for a boon, the goddess cannot refuse. A famous practitioner of the corpse ritual was the eighteenth-century Shakta poet and devotee Ramprasad Sen. He performed this ritual on a funeral pyre using a mala or rosary made of human bone. He also performed it under a bilva tree, above a seat made of the skulls of five animals, including a human skull (pancamunda asana). He gained a vision of the goddess, and she blessed him for his devotion and dedication. It was said that he died of love for Kali and that she brought him to her heaven. To bring the goddess Shakti into the corpse is also to bring life and power (sakti) into it, as Shakti is said to enliven Shiva. Some Shakta tantrikas compare the devotee’s own body to a corpse, saying that the goddess must enter into the heart to enliven it. Others say that the practitioner himself becomes both the goddess and the corpse, realizing in him or herself both the divine spirit and the physical body.

8 Conclusion We can thus see a broad range of possible afterlives within the umbrella term ‘Hinduism.’ These range from the folk traditions of ghosts and wandering spirits, to Vedic immortality and entrance into the ancestor and god worlds, to liberation through wisdom in Vedanta, attainment of enlightenment or moksha, and entrance into the heavens of the gods or the temporary hellworlds for those with bad karma. All of these are possibilities for death and afterlife. Key words: Hinduism, death, reincarnation, ancestors, rebirth, redeath, brahman, atman, samsara, karma, dharma, corpse ritual, moksha 300

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Further reading Chidester, D. (2002) Patterns of Transcendence: Religion, Death and Dying. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Filippi, G. G. (1996) Mrtyu: Concept of Death in Indian Traditions. New Delhi: D. K. Printworld. Johnson, C., et al. (1998) How Different Religions View Death and Afterlife. Philadelphia: The Charles Press. McDaniel, J. (1989) The Madness of the Saints: Ecstatic Religion in Bengal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Parry, J. (1982) ‘Sacrificial Death and the Necrophagous Ascetic,’ in: Bloch, M. and Parry, J. (eds). Death and the Regeneration of Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shastri, D. (1990) Origin and Development of the Rituals of Ancestor Worship in India. Calcutta: Bookland. Sri Swami Sivananda, (1946) What Becomes of the Soul After Death? Divine Life Society Publication [online 1999]. Available at: www.dlshq.org/download/afterdeath.htm.

Bibliography Goldman, R.P. (2016) Ramayana of Valmiki: An Epic of Ancient India,Volume. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Narayan, R.K. (2016) The Mahabharata: A shortened modern prose version of the Indian epic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. The Bhagavad Gita (2008) Translated by L. Patton. New York: Penguin Books. The Bhagavata Purana (2011) Translated by J. L. Shastri. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass: Ancient Indian Tradition and Mythology Series. The Srimad Devi Bhagavatam (1977) Translated by S.Vijnanananda. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal. The Upanishads (2008) Translated by P. Olivelle. Oxford World Classics. New York: Oxford University Press. Van Nooten, B.A. and Holland, G.B., 1994. Rig Veda: A metrically restored text with an introduction and notes (Vol. 1). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Weber, A. (1964) The Satapatha-Brahmana.Varanasi (reprint).

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24 A BROAD SURVEY OF ZULU ANCESTOR VENERATION AND THE CHALLENGES IT FACES Radikobo Ntsimane

1 Introduction This chapter examines how the Zulu people maintain a relationship with their dead ancestors in the face of challenges from industrialization, urbanization, school education, and Western Christianity. The traditional Zulu ancestor veneration religion is grounded in an agrarian lifestyle mostly in the current KwaZulu-Natal Province of South Africa. Since the mid-1800s, the adherents of this ancestor veneration religion have to negotiate ways of practicing this religion within the migrant labor system in the midst of the increasing urbanization and industrialization of South Africa. In order for the chapter to address the theme of afterlife adequately, it is vital to survey how the Zulu Cosmology necessitates the appropriate burial procedures to ensure that the deceased becomes a benevolent ancestor, how the Zulu maintain a relationship with the dead through regular ritual performances, and how the uncertainties of life sustain this belief system in industrialized centers.

2  The Zulu relationship between the living and the ‘Living-Dead’ The Zulu people, along with other people groups in Southern Africa, believe that ancestors maintain influence over the lives of their living descendants. Death serves as a transition from this life to the world of the departed where there is eating, drinking, and worrying about the living descendants. In the Zulu worldview, the living have to remember their departed by conducting rituals that can include slaughtering an animal to appease the ancestors should they be angry over the conduct of the living. This section will introduce six key aspects of the Zulu relationship with departed ancestors: the Zulu cosmology, the significance of Zulu burial procedures, the importance of the Buffalo Thorn tree (Umlahlankosi), the Zulu concept of messengers to the living-dead, existence as the living-dead, and the potentially negative consequences of improper burial procedures.

2.1  Zulu cosmology Burying their dead is a fairly new practice among the Zulu people. In the mid-1800s the Zulu customarily left their dead in the bush for the wild animals. Only people of high social standing 302

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and royalty received a burial (Krige, 1950: p. 160), probably in order to keep their flesh concealed from witches. The body parts of a person of high social standing are believed to have inherent potency that sustained their success during life. The removal of that potency could help a witch discontinue the success of the dead person’s descendants. A traditional Zulu saying declares: ukwanda kwaliwa umthakathi, meaning that ‘sorcerers do not want to see any success or growth of people other than themselves’ (Parrinder, 1968: pp. 116–119). The Zulu people believe that when one becomes an ancestor after death, one joins with one’s blood relatives and lives with them forever. They further believe that when a person dies they gain mystical powers that can influence the land of the living positively or negatively.These departed ancestors could positively influence the health and wealth of living descendants. Jim Kiernan clearly explains, Ancestors inhabit a world of spirits in which they are endowed with the capacity to influence mystically the orderly life of the group or the individuals for whom they assume structural or instrumental significance. In religious terms, their function is to be supportive and protective of the living, to ensure an ordered and fruitful existence for them. As long as ancestors fully discharge their assigned role, their descendants should enjoy a life of peace and prosperity, and neither would have reason to reproach the other or, indeed, take more than notice of the other. 1995a: p. 22 The Sotho people hold a similar worldview. Tim Couzens writes in reference to the Sotho cosmology that the ancestors influence the lives of the living by intervening directly and demanding appropriate remembrance and respect (2003: p. 60). The dead reveal their intentions and wishes to their living descendants through the use of izangoma (singular = isangoma), the diviner-healers. Ancestors randomly select and call these women and men healers to become izangoma. Susan Schuster Campbell’s book Called to Heal (1998) supplies stories of how ten women and men were called by ancestors to become izangoma. These izangoma use dreams, visions, and divining bones to receive and communicate the ancestral wishes to the living.The living who refuse to heed the instructions of the ancestors do so at their own peril, as the stories of Zulus and neighboring Swazis in Called to Heal reveal.The story of the calling of Queen Ntuli describes how she suffered from an ancestor-induced sickness for over twenty years before she agreed to be trained as an isangoma (Campbell, 1998: p. 99).

2.2  The significance of the burial procedure Given the important place that ancestors hold in the Zulu cosmology, it is incumbent for the living to ensure that the burial rites are properly followed so that they will be well-taken care of by the departed. Modern Zulu people generally bury their dead, with the exception of the few who adopt the still frowned upon practice of cremation. It is possible that the arrival of white people from Europe, especially the Christian missionaries, popularized the burial of the dead. Almost all mission stations where converts lived with their pastors have graveyards.This practice became popular around the late 1800s during the proliferation of the mission societies in Natal and Zululand. The Zulu are not a single homogenous group of people. It was not until the reign of King Shaka in the mid-1800s that the minor independent clans coalesced together to form what is known as the Zulu nation. The different clans continued to have their individual practices of funerary rituals. Across this diversity, however, many of these individual clans still share some 303

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basic commonalities. Before the burial the corpse is washed and dressed. The funeral clothes may consist of the skin of a beast slaughtered for that purpose and for supplementing the funeral meal, a sheet of cloth, or the most beautiful clothes owned by the deceased. Today such washing and dressing happens in a mortuary before placing the deceased in a coffin for transport home. The coffin then remains at the home, watched over by the family through the night. The following morning after a series of speeches in a formal event at the home or a local church, the attendees take the deceased to the grave that was prepared during the previous night. The pre-burial activities are very important and must be strictly followed. Disputes concerning proper procedure may arise between family members who hold different cosmological beliefs or who come from different regions marked by different burial customs. Different cosmologies could lead to different assumptions about proper burial procedures. For the traditional Zulu person, proper burial procedure is a matter of life and death. Even if there is a consensus among those present, sometimes the burial day comes back to haunt the living because proper procedure was not followed. Because the departed have power over the events of the living, any misfortune upon the living could be viewed as the result of their failure to properly care for the deceased. The living may visit a diviner to inquire where they faltered in their responsibilities to the deceased. Sometimes the diviner will reveal that they neglected proper burial procedures during the burial period. Diviners have special powers to communicate with the dead through dreams, visions, and divining bones (Krige, 1950: pp. 299–307). Proper burial procedure is essential for the living to benefit from the power of the departed. The adherence to the proper specifications for a burial ensures the transformation of the deceased into an ancestor. The living are thus responsible to ensure the transformation of the deceased into an ancestor in order to secure the benefits of their ancestral powers. Such proper burial procedures, however, may be intentionally omitted in cases in which the living intend to prevent the deceased from joining the ancestors.When the deceased lived as an evil person prior to death, for example, the living family members may intentionally make no efforts to join the spirit of the deceased with the benevolent ancestors. The flouting or avoidance of proper burial customs may turn the deceased into a harmful spirit (idlozi elibi; Kiernan, 1995b: p. 80).The Zulu people believe that calamity in their lives derives from the malevolence of an evil ancestor who has not found a place of rest among his or her living-dead.

2.3  The Buffalo Thorn tree, Umlahlankosi The Buffalo Thorn tree or Umlahlankosi (Ziziphus mucronata) is traditionally one of the indispensable items used for the burial of a Zulu person. Nombulelo Mazibuko of the KwaZulu-Natal Herbarium sheds light on the reasons why the Zulu and others use the Umlahlankosi in funerary rituals: Africans have many beliefs and superstitions attached to this tree. Zulus and Swazis use the buffalo thorn in connection with burial rites. It was once customary that when a Zulu chief died, the tree was planted on his grave as a reminder or symbol of where the chief lies. Hence the name umLahlankosi – that which buries the chief. A twig from the tree was and is still used to attract and carry the spirit of the deceased from the place of death to the new resting place. 2017 Living family members ensure that the use of the umlahlankosi forms an integral part of the burial out of fear of the dead person’s spirit and out of a desire to secure the positive provisions 304

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from the deceased. The family cuts a branch of nearly 30 centimeters from this tree and takes it to where the person died. The family then speaks to the deceased at the place of death as if the deceased were still alive. The Zulus believe that the spirit of the deceased enters into or rides on the branch from the place of death to the burial site.The umlahlankosi branch is thus essential for ensuring the proper journey of the spirit of the deceased. A dedicated family member (generally a male) will conduct the transportation of the branch and thus oversee this journey of the spirit of the deceased. This dedicated person carrying the branch is set apart for communication only with the deceased. Thus other family members avoid speaking with this dedicated person for the duration of the journey. A renowned diviner and commentator on Zulu tradition Dr. V.V.O. Mkhize writes about how a dead person or his spirit was returned to its rightful home: Among the Zulus the branch of umlahlankosi or umphafa as others call it, is used. It is unfortunate that there are no longer people who know how and when this branch is used when the ancestors are fetched. Today people do as they wish. There are two things that we need to distinguish.The fetching of ancestors or shades, and the fetching of deserted dwelling are different. We fetch the ancestors or shades because they died away from home. The other fetching is the fetching from the deserted dwelling where they remained because we do not know the exact graves. 2011: p. 139; translated by this author The living relatives therefore ensure that after the passing of a family member, they transport both the body and the spirit of the deceased to the clan burial site.

2.4  The messenger to the living-dead The night before the burial when the dead body has been brought home from the mortuary, friends, relatives, and family members of the deceased have an opportunity to send messages and petitions to the departed. At any given moment a designated spokesperson is given mainly brand new blankets by relatives who had unfinished businesses with the deceased to announce to the dead person and deliver a message. Except one which will be interned with the deceased, the blankets will be kept by the immediate family. The messages have a common theme: Uncle, you left us suddenly when we least expected.We shall miss you. Please pass our regards to those you will find at your destination. Please do not abandon us. Look at us with favour, especially these orphans your grandchildren. During the period when cheap wreaths made out of hardened plastic flowers were still popular, the funeral program contained a reserved time slot for reading out loud the messages accompanying each wreath. This practice could sometimes take longer than the funeral sermon. These messages included communications for the deceased to deliver to the great unknown on arrival. Bible verses, petitions, gratitude, tributes, and such were undoubtedly informed by the fact that the authors believed that having died physically the deceased has gained power to see and speak to those who went before them. Each message concludes with the common praise names of the family or clan, which both the dead and the living know well because they have been used for generations. These names serve as the proper identity of the deceased that connects to the departed. These are not secret or code names. If any Zulu person mentions their surname, it is easy even for those with no relation to them to mention their praise names. All 305

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praise names indicate that the deceased has a contingent of strong ancestors waiting for their arrival.

2.5  Being one of the living-dead Burial customs, even today, illustrate the vivid Zulu belief in the afterlife. The bereaved customarily place items that the departed may need in the afterlife in the grave with the body of the deceased. Previously, the dead were interned with a wooden head rest (isicamelo), earthenware pot (ukhamba), grass mat (icansi), blanket, (ingubo), and other concealed items. Family and friends may place these items below and on top of the coffin when it is lowered into the grave (Krige, 1950: p. 162). These offerings reflect the belief that the deceased will need these items in the afterlife. Family and friends will customarily cut these items – even when they are new – to give the appearance that these offerings were previously used in life. Making the offerings appear used limits the possibility that the deceased will reject them as unfamiliar. Krige additionally suggests that damaging the sticks and assegais offered to the dead will prevent the deceased from fighting with the ancestors already ahead in the land of the living dead. Krige mentions that seeds are put in the hand of the corpse so that the crops in the fields may not die like the deceased (1950: p. 160). The royalty used to be buried along with their living attendants who would serve them beyond the grave. Not every person who passes away becomes an ancestor.They still experience a postmortem afterlife, but not always as an ancestor exercising benevolent powers for the benefit of the living. This category of the deceased becomes, as John S. Mbiti labels them, the ‘living-dead’ (1990: p. 25). The status of  ‘ancestor’ is only given to a selection of the departed by the living: Whereas the afterlife, vaguely depicted, is for all, ancestral status is not automatically accorded to everybody, and it can vary in the value placed upon it. This is because it is really conferred by the living and ultimately depends on their continued willingness to honour it. Kiernan 1995a: p.20 The sacrifice should be performed by the male heir, so that it is the heir who ultimately confers ancestorhood on the parent (Kiernan 1995a: p. 21).

2.6  The improper burial and its negative consequences The Zulu people believe in ghosts.They believe that the unsettled spirits of the dead roam about looking for a place to rest. The emphasis on proper burial among the Zulu people additionally reflects the hope that one will be remembered after death. In reference to this hope Nürnberger writes: The hope that one might have is that one will continue to be respected after one’s demise, not to be excluded from the community, not to fall victim to fading memories, not to become a homeless spirit because of neglected funeral rites. 2007: p. 25 Improper or neglected burial rites can create a troublesome ancestor who torments rather than blesses the living. The Zulus identify these lingering and wandering spirits as indiki and indawe. These spirits bring malevolence upon the living through disturbances such as sickness. As the latter 306

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name suggests, the Zulu commonly associate these spirits with the Ndawu people of Mozambique who work as migrant laborers. The death of a migrant worker whose body and spirit remains unclaimed in a foreign land can result in one of these spirits. The Zulus refer to migrant workers who no longer go back home to their families as amabhunguka. These workers will turn into wandering spirits buried as paupers in the urban centers. Parrinder likens such spirits to ghosts: Some ghosts are spectres of those who have not received proper burial, and they wander about seeking rest until the full rites of “second burial” are performed for them. Such are ghosts of hunters who have been lost in the forests, fishermen drowned at sea, people burnt in a village fire or struck by lightning. 1962: p. 137 While all of the departed have an afterlife, not all of them take the status of an ancestor. Kiernan writes that: In the first instance, it is granted only to those who during their lifetime represented some span of authority and responsibility towards subordinates, for example heads of families, lineage or clan heads, and royalty. Ancestral influence is thus an extension of a secular role, and the relevance of the ancestors is a function of their social position while alive. This eliminates minors and childless people and it means that women less frequently become ancestors than men. 1995a: p. 20

3  Maintaining the Zulu circle of life in the modern world In order to survive in their environment, the Zulu people believe in the necessity of the presence and active participation of their departed ancestors in procreation, birth, protection, and sustenance through life and death. The departed ancestors thus acquire not only the mystical powers to influence the living, but also a special knowledge of the world beyond the present. This relationship between the living and the dead in Zulu thought is closely related to the circle of life.Two practices illustrate the Zulu belief concerning the circle of life: the practices connecting the birthplace with the burial place and the practice of spiritual repatriation.

3.1  The connectedness of the birthplace and the burial place The birth place is important because it is where one had their first breath of life. The Zulu customarily bury bodies and lay the spirits of the deceased to rest at the place of their birth in order to symbolize the circle of life. An infant’s grandmother traditionally buries the dried up and disconnected umbilical cord.The Xhosas of the Eastern Cape traditionally bury the umbilical cord in the wall of the mud hut. The household matriarch normally knows where others are buried and will not disturb them. She digs open the wall to insert the umbilical cord, then plasters over the spot with fresh mud.This practice signifies the sacredness of that hut, which holds a unifying value for all whose flesh is hidden in its walls. It is not unusual for a Zulu person to refer to a place where their umbilical cord was buried as their most important place on earth (lapho inkaba yami yasala khona).The Zulus bury umbilical cords in the cattle kraal, which is also a sacred place in ancestral veneration practices. Other people bury the umbilical cord in a sacred place furthest from the door within the main hut (umsamo), which serves as an altar. If the hut has a cement floor, then they bury the inkaba (umbilical cord) outside the hut, but close to the umsamo. 307

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The burial place of the inkaba (umbilical cord) often reflects a place where one’s forefathers dwelled. This place generally hosts the graves of the family and clan members. The practice of returning a body to its birthplace for internment reflects the conviction that a person should be laid to rest among his or her forefathers. Burying the dead of the clan close together minimizes the trouble of fetching the spirit of a dead person from a grave far away where they were buried. The rituals followed to connect the deceased with his or her departed, however, may be costly.

3.2  Spirit repatriation, Ukubuyisa The Zulu people properly care for the dead in order to prevent a spirit from lingering and causing trouble for the living. The failure to lay a spirit to rest in its birth place or among other members of its clan could result in calamity falling upon living family members or the inhabitants near the place of death. In the modern era, people travel far for various reasons, such as employment. Thus some die far away from home. In the industrialized parts of South Africa some people die of accidents at work or on the roads. Sometimes it is hard for such people to be returned home, which results with the government giving them paupers’ funerals. A spirit that does not reconnect with its ancestors cannot provide ancestral blessings for living relatives. Returning a spirit to her or his homeland allows the living relatives to look after the spirit by way of the proper rituals. In return, the ancestral spirit will join other family and clan ancestors in their responsibility to watch over the living. Unclaimed spirits remain homeless and carry no benefits for the living. Their anger has to be pacified by way of a ritual. The communities participate in prayers and rituals at cross roads in the provinces of South Africa because they believe angry spirits cause accidents on account of their neglect. A government official was quoted in a newspaper, ‘[p]erforming cultural rites and prayers will come in handy to handle these problems, but at the same time, we mustn’t ignore human error’ (Nhlanga, 2014). One may understand why the South African government goes to such great lengths to formulate a policy in order to repatriate the bodies and spirits of citizens who die abroad. A Draft Policy on Repatriation under paragraph 14.3.3 explicitly articulates their policy for repatriating the spirits of the dead: After fruitless search of human remains, after every effort to locate remains by digging out old graves, exhumation of bodies, provision of archaeologists reports, usage of the best available technologies, etc. have been unsuccessful, communities and families can consider the option of spiritual repatriation in line with customs that determine when a person dies in a foreign space, their spirit is returned to their place of birth. Should communities and families opt not to have the remains of their deceased loved one brought back home to their place of birth, such communities and families may also opt to conduct spiritual repatriation. The communities and or the families in consultation with the relevant authorities will determine whether to use e.g. a coffin or other forms to repatriate the spirit the spirit of their deceased loved one. An unpublished draft policy document of the Department of Arts and Culture of the Republic of South Africa

4  Maintaining the ancestral connection in the modern world The traditional Zulu people keep the connection to their departed ancestors in order to maintain the assurance of ancestral support and intervention during difficult times in life.They perform necessary rituals unaided or those prescribed by sangomas (healer diviners) during a 308

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consultation. While the recommendations like rituals may be deemed unavoidable to keep a beneficial relationship with ancestors, the modern industrialized world may militate against the performance of such actions. The final section of this chapter, therefore, focuses on the centrality of maintaining proper communications between the living and the dead in Zulu ancestor veneration, as well as the recently emerging challenges to these practices in the modern world.

4.1  Communicating between the living and the dead The constant communication between the living and the dead generally takes place between the living and the three most recently departed generations (i.e. parents, grandparents, and greatgrandparents). Jim Kiernan gives a clear explanation: There are limits, therefore, to the perceived usefulness of ancestors, whose recall as singular active spiritual agents is thus affected. Aside from royal figures who constitute a special case, the hierarchy of identifiable ancestors varies in depth at most three generations, in case of local descent groups, to five or more generations for ancestors whose function it is to articulate the connectedness of numerous local groups.Thus, as an ancestor become more distant, their span of influence expands and becomes more diffuse, but the intensity of their involvement in issues of immediate living diminishes. 1995a: pp. 20, 21 Even during the talk with ancestors at the umsamo, the most sacred place in the main hut serving as an altar, the male spokesperson will largely direct his apologies, petitions, and gratitude to those departed that he personally knew when they were alive. During the ukubuyisa ritual (transporting the spirit of the dead person to its proper resting place) that happens about a year after the person was buried, the spirit of the dead person is enjoined with the spirit of other ancestors in order to fortify the clan and provide for it. Eilen Jensen Krige writes: On this occasion the name of the deceased is included in the praises of the ancestors for the first time after his death, and is especially asked, when the meat is placed at the umsamo, to come back to the village and look after his people. Often, as a further measure to ensure his return, his eldest son, takes the branch of a tree and drags it from the grave into the house, by this process bringing him home. 1950: pp. 169, 170 The living-dead come to their descendants in a myriad of manifestations in order to communicate their wishes. They appear to the living through dreams, visions, and through the appearance of live snakes. Such belief is not unique to the Zulu people. Couzens writes in reference to the Sotho ancestors’ manifestations in the form of snakes: ‘On occasion, they manifested their hypostasis, their continued presence, by taking the form of a snake, which species was usually treated with extreme reverence’ (2003: p. 60). In addition to snake manifestations Nürnberger writes, Because they cannot be seen, their reactions cannot be monitored.Their presence calls for high alertness. They “speak” through dreams, divinations, omens, whirlwinds, hail, comets, droughts, infertility or animals such as snakes. 2007: p. 38 309

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Berglund expounds on the Zulu people’s belief in ancestral manifestations as snakes.There is no particular shape or color they choose but the ones that shed their skins and are single-tongued with green color are common (1976: pp. 94, 95). Similar to snakes who visit a homestead as bearers of good news, a visit by an ithongo (another name for an ancestor) in a dream is an indication of good tidings. Berglund records the Zulu belief that the ithongo bring happiness to the people (1976: p. 99). Traditional Zulu people cannot do without the presence of their departed ancestors. In fact, according to the Zulu cosmology, without the ancestors there can be no Zulu person. One can say that from the cradle to the grave, there is an inextricable bond between the departed and the living Zulus. The departed ancestors of both the groom and the bride are joined during the marriage ceremony through shedding the blood of a beast (mainly a cow or a goat) and smearing the bile on the couple. The act of sexual intercourse for procreation happens only at the direction of the ancestors. Calling them shades, Axel-Ivar Berglund by way of an interview, shows their involvement: B:  ‘Do the shades cause desire in women also?’    ‘That is their work.When the woman is hot, it is the shades that are working in the heat.

They are causing it.’ B:  ‘Which shades live in the woman?’     ‘Her father’s shades. They are the ones in her. They stir her.’ B:  ‘So in sexual union, both the man’s shades and the woman’s shades work together?’    ‘They are working together, the shades of his fathers and of her fathers.They bring more

and more heat to both. The man works very much until the water comes. Then he falls back, weak. He is weak because the shades are now out of him, in the woman. That is why the woman still sometimes remains hot.The shades are moulding.They are making the child’ 1976: p. 117 From time to time, the shades are present in the life of a child, thus requiring the parents and relatives to perform compulsory ancestor-related rituals. Several rituals serve to connect or cement the connection between children and their departed ancestors. Since the ancestors can see where the living cannot see, families are dependent on them to watch over the children and protect them from all forms of harm and danger. Mkhize describes some of these compulsory rituals: Imbeleko, [which] is a ritual where a goat is slaughtered and the baby is introduced to its ancestors. The skin is tanned and used as the blanket to carry the baby on the back as the Zulu name suggests. Umhlonyane, is a ritual for girls showing signs of puberty stage. A male goat is slaughtered and the matter is reported to the ancestors that the child is now of age. Umemulo: this is a ceremony to thank the ancestors for the daughter who has grown up. In this case a bull or ox is slaughtered and the daughter is covered with the inner fatty tissue. 2011: pp. 85–88 Bhekisisa Mncube, a widely travelled Zulu person living in the city, recently wrote a newspaper article concerning his unshaken belief and trust in the efficacy of the living-dead. He wrote

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about an experience in which he fell ill because his parents neglected to perform a thanksgiving ritual when he was born: There is a live communication between the living and ancestors while impepho burns. After Ukuthetha idlozi and ukushweleza [talking and pleading] were done, a goat was slaughtered as an offering to the ancestors. The whole village came for Umqombothi [sorghum beer] and the family feasted on the goat meat. After the ritual was performed, I recovered miraculously. 2017: p. 9 The Zulu generally understand calamity as the result of the ancestors’ withholding their support and protection from their descendants or the work of sorcerers. In fact, relations between the living and the dead are fraught with uncertainty. Ancestors are capable of reneging on their responsibilities [of providing health and wealth] and of turning against descendants, appearing to be capricious and unreliable guardians and meriting the reproach of the living. Kiernan 1995a: p. 20 When family members are ill, facing court cases, experiencing poor performance at work or at school, are about to lose their jobs or their property, then the first inquiry into the problem probes the status of their relationship with ancestors. If this relationship is broken, then the living must find a way to repair it. Since one is never certain about the needs and wishes of their ancestors, a sangoma (diviner-healer) will be consulted to determine the reasons for the misfortune. In preemption of misfortune one has to do regular consultations especially when one sees a departed family member in dreams. Although dead and buried, the Zulus call their departed for protection at any time of the day. For instance when one is walking and accidentally steps on an uneven surface or a stone that could cause them to fall, they would shout out to one of their ancestors. One man of the Mkhize clan that I knew used to call out, ‘Gcwabe!’ every time he stumbled.

4.2  Modern challenges to Zulu ancestor veneration When diamonds and gold were discovered in Kimberley and Johannesburg in the 1860s and 1880s respectively, men from the then Natal Colony, Zululand, and from African countries as far as today’s Tanzania flocked to Kimberley in search of work and wealth. This migration, combined with the rising urbanization and industrialization of society, raised new questions about how to negotiate the appropriate relationship with the living- dead. While it is correct to say that the fundamental tenets of African religions concerning ancestor veneration face a serious practical challenge in industrial and urban settings, it is also correct that the adherents constantly seek ways to keep such traditions relevant for their own personal gain. Jim Kiernan speaks of a similar situation when writing about the challenges facing the migrant laborers who flocked to the urban and industrial centers of South Africa. He writes concerning the Zionist type of African Independent Churches: Uprooted from close-knit homogenous community, the worker transferred to a largescale heterogeneous urban society. Social stress and uncertainty result from being

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thrown into relatively unknown close and protracted association with outright strangers in work and residence. A sense of inadequacy and alienation is also produced by the industrial emphasis on efficiency, on the regulated control of time, and on the achievement of productive targets. 1995c: p. 123 Desperate situations called for desperate measures for all those who came to new and unfamiliar places. While some sought means and meaning in the churches, others appealed to the protection and guidance of their ancestors. Due to the manner in which ancestor veneration was practiced in the pre-industrial era, it is clear that ancestor veneration naturally flourishes better in rural agrarian settings. Far from their ancestral homes, the men had to find ways to connect with their shades. While they could invoke their ancestral spirit to accompany them to their new places, the sharing of hostel compounds denied them the sacred umsamo space for constant communication with the burning of incense called impepho (Helichrysum Odoratissimum). The migrant workers continued to face obstacles to ancestor veneration in urban settings after leaving the single-sex hostel compounds to dwell in closely built rented township municipality houses. One could not make a fire or produce smoke inside as some veneration rituals required for fear of damaging the rented home.The town by-laws prohibit the slaughtering of beasts anywhere else except for the authorized abattoirs, for hygienic and health reasons. Besides the possibilities of exposing the neighbors to disease from the slaughtered animal, the noise from the slaughtered animal can disturb local residents. When ritual slaughtering takes place where a goat is almost always involved, it has to be ‘encouraged’ to cause noise in order to invoke the presence of the ancestors. Migrant workers had to find other ways to maintain their connection to the ancestors without the use of traditional ritual ingredients such as impepho (incense). Sangomas (healer diviners) and other diviners who traditionally operated in rural villages had to come to urban areas to provide their services of connecting the living and their living-dead.These diviners often moved to areas heavily populated with rural migrant workers who faced unprecedented challenges of survival among strange people from all over the world. Impepho and other medicinal plant matter (umuthi) had to be brought from rural areas and dried for later use. Walking through the major cities of KwaZulu-Natal and Johannesburg, one can see an array of herbs and animal species especially near the public transport stations. Diviners had to negotiate new legal restrictions when traditional plants and animals used to maintain the relationship between the living and their ancestors were placed on protected species lists by the government. Sangomas also use wild animals, most of which are protected. In muthi (traditional medicine) shops, a variety of animals and animal body part are readily available for sale. Snakes, in full and in parts, dried eagles and owls are some of the endangered species often on offer. In South Africa, the law which protects plant species also protects animal species. Sangomas use both. It is a criminal offence to be found in possession of a protected plant or animal species. Ntsimane, 2007: pp. 25–38 In 1898, in Durban, the economic capital of KwaZulu-Natal, officials discovered that a medicinal plant called umondi (Mondia whitea) was extinct. Referring to other medicinal plants Karen E. Flint notes: These types of muthi not only became more expensive as they became increasingly rare but had to be gathered from farther and farther afield. Likewise healers from the 312

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rural areas found they now had to come to town to buy herbs they had once gathered for free. 2008: p. 191 Some urban Zulus deny the efficacy of the ancestor veneration and openly distance themselves from any association with it. Zulus denying the power of the ancestors tend to have education and be Christians in churches established by Western missionaries. The medically trained doctor Zama Gama narrated to the author Susan S. Campbell how his parents, especially his father, openly refused to associate with ancestors: My mother was a staunch Christian. My father was an uneducated but very clever man who grew up in traditional ways and saw no problems with it. He decided he wanted nothing to do with things traditional. So I grew up knowing nothing about traditional healing methods. Only when I came into contact with others at school and at university did I begin to hear about traditional healers. Campbell, 1998: p. 156 Sangoma Queen Ntuli tells a similar story that her father, who was a Methodist minister, forbade visits to healers until her daughter became ill with an incurable disease (Campbell, 1998: p. 99). South Africa’s establishment as a democratic country in 1994 allowed for the open practice of all religions. Prior to the establishment of this religious freedom, many people consulted izangoma (diviner-healers) only under the cover of the night, lest they be seen to associate with ‘forces of darkness’ and perceived as uneducated traditionalists (amaqaba) who trust in ancestral powers. The veneration of ancestors was seen as a backward practice. Thus people seeking to maintain an educated Western appearance were inclined to venerate their ancestors only in secret. Today, however, a greater number of people from a large spectrum of society proudly display their isiphandla (a bangle made out of goat skin worn while still wet until it breaks off due to drying out) signaling the connection to their ancestors. Mncube writes concerning the isiphandla: As part of imbeleko ceremony, afterwards, the child must wear isiphandla, which is a goat-skin bangle which is a symbol that a right ritual has been performed. Alternatively, historians describe isiphandla as an armlet of a hide which is worn by that particular person for whom the goat was slaughtered. Isiphandla is worn for many traditional purposes by Africans, especially Zulus who practice their tradition and belief in ancestors. 2017: p. 9

5 Conclusion The fact that ancestor veneration survived for so long in the midst of opposition from Western Christianity with its imposition of school education and healthcare confirms its resilience. The traditional Zulus fear that ancestors can withhold their provisions and let calamity befall their living descendants. In order to keep their connection with ancestors, Zulus ensure good conduct, proper burials, and appropriate rituals at regular intervals. Where one is uncertain of the state of their relationship with their ancestors, a sangoma is consulted and relevant procedures to repair relationships followed. The sale of the impepho at public taxi ranks in major cities and the 313

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public wearing of isiphandla bangle from freshly slaughtered goats are an outward manifestation of constant intervention of the living-dead on behalf of their descendants. Key words: Zulu, South Africa, Buffalo Thorn tree, ancestor veneration, afterlife, sangoma

Further reading Keirnan, J. (1995) ‘African Traditional Religions in South Africa,’ in: Prozesky, M. and de Gruchy, J. (eds). Living faiths in South Africa. New York: St. Martin’s Press, pp. 15–27. Keirnan has devoted slightly more than three pages to discussing ancestors and how the living communicated with them. Ntsimane, R. (2007) ‘Navigating Turbulent Water: The Challenges Facing Women Traditional Healers in Post-apartheid KwaZulu-Natal,’ Journal of Constructive Theology, 13(1), pp. 25–38. This article discusses the urban challenges faced by traditional healers who serve as connectors of the ancestors and the living. Campbell, S. S. (1998) Called to Heal: Traditional Healing Meets Modern Medicine in Southern Africa Today. Johannesburg: Zebra Press. Campbell discusses how ancestors call to service the sangomas, whose job is to prescribe ways to repair relationships between the departed and the living.

Bibliography Berglund, A. -I. (1976) Zulu Thought-patterns and Symbolism. Cape Town: David Philip. Campbell, S. S. (1998) Called to Heal: Traditional Healing Meets Modern Medicine in Southern Africa Today. Johannesburg: Zebra Press. Couzens,T. (2003) Murder in Morija: Faith, Mystery, and Tragedy on an African Mission. Johannesburg: Random House. Flint, K. E. (2008) Healing Traditions: African Medicines, Cultural Exchange, and Competition in South Africa, 1820–1948. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Kiernan, J. (1995a) ‘African Traditional Religions in South Africa,’ in: Prozesky, M. and de Gruchy, J. (eds). Living Faiths in South Africa. Cape Town: David Philip. Kiernan, J. (1995b) ‘The Impact of White Settlement on African Traditional Religions,’ in: Prozesky, M. and de Gruchy, J. (eds). Living Faiths in South Africa. Cape Town: David Philip. Kiernan, J. (1995c) ‘The African Independent Churches,’ in: Prozesky, M. and de Gruchy, J. (eds). Living Faiths in South Africa. Cape Town: David Philip. Krige, E. J. (1950) The African Social System of the Zulus. Pietermaritzburg: Shuter and Shooter. Mazibuko, N. (2007) ‘Ziziphus mucronata,’ South Africa National Biodiversity Institute [online]. Available at: http://pza.sanbi.org/ziziphus-mucronata. [Accessed 21 June 2017]. Mbiti, J. S. (1990) African Religions and Philosophy. Portsmouth: Oxford. Mkhize,V.V.O. (2011) Umsamo (Iziko La Mathongo). Sandton: Umsamo African Institute. Mncube, B. (2017) ‘A Quandary as Rituals Pile Up,’ The Witness [A Daily Newspaper]. 23 June, p. 9. Nhlanga, P. (2014) ‘Evil Spirits Lurk on Our Roads,’ Mpumalanga News [Mpumalanga Provincial Newspaper]. 4 August. Available at: Mpumulanganews.co.za. [Accessed 11 November 2017]. Ntsimane, R. (2007) ‘Navigating Turbulent Water: The Challenges Facing Women Traditional Healers in Post-apartheid KwaZulu-Natal,’ Journal of Constructive Theology, 13(1), pp. 25–38. Nürnberger, K. (2007) The Living Dead and the Living God: Christ and the Ancestors in a Changing Africa. Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications. Parrinder, E. G. (1968) African Traditional Religion. London: SPCK.

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25 DEATH AND LIFE IN A PLURALISTIC SOCIETY Boundary-making and boundary-crossing in Sino-Burmese-Tibetan borderlands Keping Wu 1 Introduction Deep in the mountains at the Sino-Burmese-Tibetan borderlands, death is not the end of life. Instead, death challenges the living to deal with the ‘other’ and one another. Based on an ethnographic study of a border town and its four villages in Southwest China – a diverse population of about 6,000 – this chapter describes four types of death rituals that are commonly celebrated here and concludes that death rituals, while preparing for the dead to cross the boundary to the other world, serve as boundary-making and boundary-crossing exercises for the living to create communities and engage with traditions that are not their own. Therefore, death has become one of the mechanisms of pluralistic living. The study of death, or rather, death rituals, in China has captured the attention of generations of anthropologists and historians. Most anthropological studies of death in China unanimously focused on rituals – especially ritual symbols, structure, and sequences – whereas historical studies focus on religious beliefs and philosophical ideas (such as Glavany, 2012; Choi, 2017). The role of the state and the accompanying politics of death is also another theme favored by scholars (Zhou, 2009; Liu, 2015; Nedostup, 2017). However, most such studies focus on predominantly Han Chinese societies, with a few honorable exceptions, such as Erik Mueggler’s ethnography on death practices of the Yi in northern Yunnan (2017) and Elizabeth Johnson’s study of Hakka women’s funeral laments in the now classic edited book Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China by the anthropologist James Watson and historian Evelyn Rawski (1988). China is far from a monolithic society. To assume that there is a Chinese way of dying or a Chinese death ritual is insufficient to say the least. As Watson remarked in his introduction to the aforementioned edited book, variation needs to be taken into account (1988: pp. 15–18). Tony Walters, writing on the sociology of death, also calls for the attention to ‘differences in societies’ as well as ‘social change’ (Walters, 2014: pp. 39–41) which are other ways of thinking about variations. What is also missing is a focus on pluralistic and multi-religious societies that are increasingly the condition in which most people live in today’s globalized world (Cann, 2015). Furthermore, different from earlier studies on death rituals that focus on ritual sequences, this chapter directs attention to all the people, not just the ritual specialists, participating in the ritual. Though grief or bereavement features paramount importance in the death process and 315

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should be given more weight in academic discussions, that will be the subject of a different paper. This chapter will limit itself to the consequences of death rituals on ways of the living in a pluralistic society and the diverse communities involved. Building on classic anthropological studies of death rituals and current scholarship on boundaries, this chapter aims to demonstrate that death in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society is of central importance for the regeneration of its pluralistic cultural logic. Largely focusing on the symbolic and ideological analyses of death, Bloch and Parry argue that ‘what is revitalized in the funerary practices is that resource which is culturally conceived to be the most essential to the reproduction of social order’ (1982: p. 7, emphasis original) – thus ‘regenerating life.’ My research reaches a similar conclusion, not based on symbolic analysis, but rather, from the perspective of the people partaking in the death rituals and the way rituals are socially organized. Another perspective that is central to my study is the importance of boundaries. Fredrik Barth, writing almost half a century ago, shifted our attention from the cultural contents of ethnic groups to boundaries maintained by actors as the quintessential marker of ethnic identity (1969). Adam Seligman and Robert Weller (2012) push the idea of boundaries further and beyond the scope of ethnicity by examining how rituals prompt boundary-crossings in pluralistic societies. This current study benefits from this stream of thinking and investigates how religious and ethnic boundaries are crossed in death rituals. The people in my research encounter death rituals of multiple traditions on a daily basis. It is commonplace for one person to be trilingual. Some even speak four to five languages as a result of pluralistic co-habitation. On the one hand, death rituals become important occasions where each sub-community draws its boundaries by clearly delineating what is ‘our way of doing things.’ On the other hand, each death ritual also mandates the participation of people from different ethnic and religious groups who are an integral part of the ritual. Therefore, a pluralistic social order is instated through boundary-crossing practices in the death rituals. In the rest of the paper, I will present one such pluralistic society by foregrounding the ethnic and religious diversity of the township, Bingzhongluo, followed by accounts of Buddhist, Protestant, Catholic, and animistic death rituals. By way of conclusion, I will extrapolate how boundary-making and boundary-crossing is exercised in the rituals of the deceased.

2  A pluralistic society: ethnic and religious diversity in Bingzhongluo The township of Bingzhongluo administratively belongs to Gongshan County of Nujiang Lisu Autonomous Prefecture in Yunnan Province. It consists of thirty-two multi-ethnic and multireligious villages bordering Tibet on the north and Myanmar to the west.The Salween tributary, locally called Nujiang and literarily meaning ‘angry River,’ runs through the heart of Bingzhongluo. The township is also nestled in two snow mountains, Gaoli Gong and Biluo, each over 4,000 meters high. Despite its location on the route of the famous ‘Tea-horse Trail’ that connected Tibet, inland China, India, and Southeast Asia since the 11th century to the 1950s, it is a place known for its inaccessibility and poverty. The death rate is very high. The major causes of death are diseases, alcohol, and accidents, such as falling off the mountains or into the river. Due to its prevalence in the region, alcohol is often related to both diseases and accidents. Families brew their own alcohol and often a large amount of the food supply goes into the alcohol making. Alcohol abuse leads to various physical and neurological diseases, as well as accidents related to activities under the influence, such as drunk driving. Many people are diagnosed with stomach diseases caused by alcohol overdose. A term that people often use to refer to people with mental illnesses is ‘Jiu Fengzi,’ which literarily means ‘alcoholic lunatic.’ Accidents related to alcohol also abound, especially with the unique geographic features of the place. One man told me that his wife wandered off the cliff on their way back from a banquet at a relative’s 316

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house. A boy lost both his parents due to drunk driving. In one of the funerals I will mention below, a drunk man killed his friend by accident. During my six years of fieldwork in this region, I have not yet met a family without any members of the family or close relatives dying of causes related to alcohol. Death, to a certain degree, has become normalized. One old man told me with a smile that two of his sons were killed by a mini-bus accident caused by a drunk driver who drove into the river. As a result of such frequent occurrences, I was able to witness funerals during many field trips made to Bingzhongluo. Bingzhongluo is also one of the most diverse societies within China, composing four major ethnic groups – the Nu, Lisu, Tibetan, and Dulong, and four major religious groups – animistic, Tibetan Buddhist, Protestant, and Catholic. Since the Chinese government treats Protestantism and Catholicism as two separate religions and also since the two groups act quite differently in local contexts, in this chapter I will also treat them as two separate religious groups. According to the 2011 census, 3,275 people in Bingzhongluo were registered as belonging to the Nu ethnicity, 2,015 as Lisu, 540 as Tibetan, and 413 as Dulong.1 The small number of Han (152) and Bai (eleven) are mostly business people working in the market town, running restaurants, hostels, supermarkets, vegetable stands, and other shops. Additionally, a few Han men have married local women in recent years and built houses in the villages. Two Hui Muslim families moved to Bingzhongluo in the past few years, operating two restaurants in the market town. Since pigs are very important to the villagers, the Muslim Hui rarely enters villages or participate in village life.2 Besides ethnic diversity, Bingzhongluo, as many border places in southwest China, is also known for its religious plurality. Before the arrival of any institutionalized religions in the past three centuries, animism was the main religious practice. Called Namsa3 in Nu and Dulong and Nipa4 in Lisu, the shamans are the main ritual specialists who heal illnesses, make offerings to the spirits, and transport the souls of the dead to the other world (or back to the land where the ancestors are from). However, with the arrival of institutionalized religions, especially different types of Christianity that act strongly against shamanistic practices, and the anti-superstition campaigns of the Chinese government in the 1950s and 1960s, the number of shamans has significantly decreased. By 2014, the only shaman I was able to interview in detail passed away and only a small number of villagers actually went to those shamans for healing or other ritual services. However, shamans were still important for non-Christian funerals. They often work side by side with Buddhist monks in death rituals. The first Tibetan Buddhist temple in Bingzhongluo – the Universal Salvation Temple, or the Puhua Temple – was built in 1766 by monks from Tibet propagating their religion. Devout Tibetan families who came with the monks and served the daily needs of the monks settled around the temple, gradually forming a village called Lama Zhong, meaning ‘the village of monks.’ Impressed by the miraculous things the monks were able to achieve, many Nu people living in nearby villages gradually become followers of Tibetan Buddhism. As a matter of fact, over half of the forty-two registered monks of the temple today are of Nu descent. It is considered an honor for the Tibetan and Nu Buddhist families to send a son to the temple. By the end of 2011, the official record of Bingzhongluo showed that 2,600 people were self-reported Buddhists. One thing worth noting is that Tibetan Buddhism, as it was practiced in Tibet, did not eliminate shamanistic practices. In fact, the shaman I knew well was once a monk in the temple until monks were driven out of temples during the 1960s and spirits began to call upon him to do healing. Sometimes the monks are hired to perform in rituals that have traditionally been considered Namsa’s work or the Nipa would work side by side with Buddhist monks on funerals. Buddhists from Tibet often practice water burial. However, in Bingzhongluo, almost everybody, regardless of their religious affiliations, is buried in the ground. This may be due to the cultural 317

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influence of Nu people who are the more ‘indigenous’ group there. There is no written or oral record, however, of water burials for Tibetan Buddhists in Bingzhongluo. The Catholic missionaries from the MEP (Soceite des Missionaries Etrangeres de Paris) and the Order of the Grand St. Bernard of Switzerland came to evangelize Tibet in 1846 (Lim, 2013: p. 112) and established the Tibetan diocese in 1854. In the same year, the French missionary Jean Charles Fage came to Bingzhongluo and converted the Nu and Tibetan slaves of rich Tibetans to Catholicism (Gros, Nima and Liu, 2011: p. 50). A typical feature of Catholics in China (Madsen, 1998; Uhalley and Wu, 2001), entire lineages would convert to Catholicism and many Catholics have extended kinship relations. By the end of 2011, there were 889 selfregistered Catholics, mostly of Tibetan or Nu or mixed Tibetan-Nu descent. Among them, the Xiao, Hu (tiger) and Xiong (bear) families are the most influential lineages. Today, the Catholics have distinctive death practices that differentiate them from others in part, but also share many features with Buddhist or animistic death rituals. None of the three groups have food restrictions. Therefore, they can often help each other cook and eat together. The Britain-based China Inland Mission and United States-based Assembly of God first converted the Lisu to Protestantism in the early 1900s. J. Russell Morse, originally affiliated with the United Christian Missionary Society (UCMS) and later with the Churches of Christ (Foster et al., 2004: p. 36), was the leading figure in spreading the Protestant mission among the Lisu after he failed to evangelize among the Tibetans. A common tale circulated among the Lisu Protestant pastors went like this: The western Protestant missionaries regarded converting Tibetans, the most religious people, to Christianity as a great achievement. However, their efforts met with very little success. In contrast, the Lisu, working as slaves to the Tibetans at that time, were hospitable to the missionaries. So, they happily accepted the faith. No matter how true this tale was, the Lisu was among the most ‘Christianized’ ethnic groups in China.The China Inland Missionary James O. Fraser created the Lisu orthography in collaboration with Karen assistants who spoke Lisu.5 As a result, the Fraser Bible has become the most commonly used Bible among the Lisu throughout the world. In fact, different from Catholics who mainly use Bibles translated into Chinese, all the Protestants in Bingzhongluo use the Fraser Bible in Lisu, regardless of their ethnicities. In Burma, I met an old Kachin Protestant woman reading the Lisu and Kachin Bible side by side. By 2011, the official record in Bingzhongluo showed 806 Protestants.The actual number of Protestants is much bigger since formal baptism is not frequently carried out and children were not counted in the official record.6 With a mission to ‘civilize’ the ethnic minorities and protect them from diseases, the early missionaries forbade the Protestant converts to drink or smoke, or eat blood or dead animal meats.Therefore, Protestants seem to be the most isolated from the other villagers, though as I will show below, their boundaries are also more porous than imagined.

3  Porous plurality – ethnic and religious boundaries crossed Ethnicity and religion are among the two most important categories that governments utilize throughout the world to regulate their population. However, the reality in Bingzhongluo defeats such ‘brick’ walls in favor of ‘cell’ walls (Seligman et al., 2008: pp. 93–97), making up the boundaries of those categories, even though those categories are favored by the state. In China, the state-initiated ethnic classification project and state-sanctioned five official religions

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(Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism) further solidify the boundaries among ethnic and religious groups. The Ethnic Classification Project by the PRC government which recognizes a finite number of fifty-six ethnic categories out of over 400 proposed names was the first large-scale nation-wide project that invoked modern ‘scientific’ and ethnological methods involving large numbers of scholars and intellectuals in the country. Although this was also the first time each of the recognized groups was given equal status and representation in the People’s Congress, Nicholas Tapp calls this process an ‘internal “self- Orientalizing” mission designed to homogenize and reify internal cultural differences’ (2002: p. 65). Of the fifty-six ethnic categories, twenty-five peoples were recognized among over 200 group names proposed in Yunnan province alone (Mullaney, 2011). However, this was not the first attempt to categorize peoples of China. As early as the third to second century bce, the Han Dynasty court historian Sima Qian already recorded the names of barbarian peoples living in the present-day Yunnan and Guizhou provinces (Yang, 2009: p. 10). Every dynasty or government uses ethnic categorization as a form of bio-politics. Those categories may be problematic – drawing lines where they should not be drawn or not distinguishing groups that are self-identified as different. Once created, however, those categories often become internalized and used by the actors to identify themselves out of convenience. Every citizen in Bingzhongluo has an ID card that indicates his or her ethnicity. But if one assumes that those ethnic categories have anything to do with their blood, language, or customs, one will be completely mistaken. Intermarriages are so frequent that very few people are of a ‘pure’ ethnicity. Furthermore, the necessity of co-inhabiting with people of different linguistic practices forces everyone to be multi-lingual and multi-cultural. For instance, in the beginning of my fieldwork, I was always amazed how ‘fake’ the cultural performances are for the tourists. During one of the supposedly ‘Nu’ traditional festivals, anybody, no matter what their ID cards say about their ethnicity, can dress in the ‘traditionally Nu’ clothing and perform ‘traditional Nu’ songs and dances. Later, I realized this is what their sophistication belies: the inhabitants of Bingzhongluo frequently viewed ethnicity as a merely performative category, instead of an identity separated by brick walls. One Tibetan man told me a story about how the riders of horse caravans on the ‘Tea-horse Trail’ were mostly Nu people hired by the Tibetan owners. Those Nu gradually learned Tibetan ways of dressing, eating, and talking, and they all became Tibetan. Another man told me how one village became officially categorized as Lisu (regardless of how they self-identified) when a village cadre decided that the entire village was Lisu. Furthermore, since everybody is well-versed in the various ethnic categories’ language and customs, it is really a performative choice when it comes to ethnic identity. This extreme fluidity lends itself to the pluralistic logic – the more one is capable of being the other, the more power one has. The members of the society who can speak the greatest number of languages and sing and dance from the most varieties of traditions accumulate the most resources. I know two sisters whose father was Tibetan and whose mother was Nu.They were often hired to perform at various traditional cultural festivals, since they could easily adapt to the different festivals’ cultural variations. As a result, they were so resourceful that they were the first ones to own stores and restaurants in the village and entertain tourists. People often asked them for help in other social occasions to enliven the atmosphere. I identify this ethnic fluidity as a pluralistic social order. Before delving into how death rituals reinforce and reproduce this social order of pluralism, allow me to address how religious categories in Bingzhongluo participate in this plurality in a different way. In the People’s Republic of China, the Religious Affairs Bureau (RAB) and the Ethnic Affairs Bureau (EAB) are one administrative unit. However, while ethnic groups enjoy certain rights, especially representation in the local or central government, there are no specific

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rights reserved for religious groups. Therefore, ethnicity is often the more ‘pronounced’ identity one enjoys. Whereas religion, due to state-endorsed atheism, is largely ignored as a way of organizing social lives, in Bingzhongluo, the situation is quite different. First of all, a large part of daily life in the villages is structured around various religious holidays. According to the monks in Puhua Temple, they celebrate four important holidays: the Chinese New Year, the Lantern Festival (January 15), the Mid-Autumn Festival (August 15), and the Flower Festival (March 15).7 What is fascinating about this narrative is that the first three holidays are all Han Chinese festivals that are normally not regarded as Buddhist and the last one is often regarded as an animistic festival associated with the tradition of Nu people. The celebration of those festivals shows the inclusivity and fluidity of the local Buddhism. On those occasions, large crowds gather in the temple compound (or outside of the sacred cave where the Flower Festival is celebrated), getting blessings from the living Buddha and watching the monks perform Mahakala dances and recite sutras. The Protestants worship five times a week: Friday and Saturday evenings and three times on Sundays. They celebrate Easter, Thanksgiving (any Sunday after the autumn harvest), and Christmas (three days). The Catholics gather once a week on Sundays and have big celebrations on Easter and Christmas Day. Since around 70% of villagers subscribe to one religious group or another, these public celebrations of each religious group mark the calendars of the villages. Second, most life rituals, such as births, weddings, funerals, and important life events such as illnesses or the building of a new house, involve the participation of the religious community. Sometimes even the labor activity can be organized by religious affiliations. One of the major sources of income for residents comes from collecting mushrooms or herbs, and normally involves an extended stay in the mountains for over two weeks at a time. Because the Protestants do not drink or smoke and they do not work on Sundays, they could only work side by side with other Protestants in those organized labor trips. Some youth from the same religious backgrounds partner up to seek migrant work in the big cities due to shared networks. Death rituals, however, are particularly planned according to an individual’s religious affiliation, as I shall show below. I should note here that by ‘religion,’ I do not mean the narrow sense of the word, restricting to the sacred, supernatural, or transcendental. Instead, I mean the total social, cultural, and economic aspects of the religious community. Death rituals involve the entire religious community to which the deceased belongs. Third, since most villages are co-inhabited by people of different religious affiliations, and since it is also common for different members of the same family to have different religions, each villager has first-hand experiences of other people’s religious practices. Besides religion and kinship, another social unit that matters in rituals is village identity.To be a social member of the village mandates the participation in life and death rituals of other members of the village. One survey conducted in Bingzhongluo cites 91.4% people will participate in death rituals of people belonging to a different religion or ethnicity (Yang, 2012). All of those occasions are open to everybody. I went to numerous services and met others who were there just out of curiosity. There was one boy who was quite special. Dressed and talking differently, he was from the city.Whenever he was visiting his grandparents in the village during his school breaks, he would come to Protestant services simply because he ‘loved the way they sing.’ Nobody frowned upon him. Instead, they all welcomed him and volunteered to teach him to sing. The church elder even gave him special lessons despite the fact that the boy’s family was Buddhist. So far, we have established that ethnic and religious categories in Bingzhongluo are both significant and fluid. On the one hand, the geographic location of the Tea-horse Trail makes Bingzhongluo a point of interconnection and a meeting place for people of various origins. On the other hand, the precarious natural environment has made it impossible to live without making 320

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alliances with others.8 It is therefore both important to achieve group solidarity within one’s own communities (boundary-making) and to establish a social order that favors cross-cutting ties that make those ethnic and religious boundaries permeable. Death rituals, as a frequent occurrence in Bingzhongluo and one that occupies central importance in their lives, facilitate people in Bingzhongluo to achieve both.

4  Boundary-making and boundary-crossing – animistic, Buddhist, Catholic, and Protestant funerals Death rituals in Bingzhongluo comprise two parts: the liturgical part that is conducted by religious experts and the social part that is attended by all the villagers. The liturgical part, I argue, achieves group solidary of each religious community through making boundaries. The social part mandates the individual to cross those boundaries and participate in the tradition of the other out of affection toward the deceased or the obligation to the society. If a person dies, the funeral is organized according to the dead person’s religious affiliation, regardless of the surviving family members’ religions as they may be different. The family members will be present at the funerals, though probably not participating in the most ‘sacralized’ aspect of the funeral. Regardless of the religious traditions, a ‘ritual leader’ will be immediately appointed by the family to be in charge of the entire organization of the funeral.This leader is normally a person who is capable and well respected in the village. Normally a man, the ritual leader does not necessarily belong to the same religious community as the deceased. Nonetheless, he knows about all the different religious traditions well enough to pay respect to them. As mentioned before, the animistic and Buddhist funerals are often combined in today’s Bingzhongluo. In a recent funeral I attended, a young man was killed by his best friend by accident when the two got very drunk over home-brewed liquor. As the young man was a Buddhist, the appointed ritual leader, who was a Catholic, immediately summoned the Nipa as well as the monks in the nearby Puhua Temple.The dead body was placed next to the fire pit, the center of the house. The Nipa came and sat by the fire pit, joined by the family, in this case, the dad (the mother had died already) and the uncles. The Nipa sang a few songs that would guide the soul of the deceased to the land of the ancestors.9 Gradually people were notified. Every family in the village sent someone over and the relatives from other villages also came. They all came to pay respect to the family in the main house first. Some brought some money and some brought some food, mostly alcohol and meat. In the next room, which was the granary, a worship table was set up. The wall was covered with tankas, or pictures of Buddhist figures. Six monks were sitting around the table, reciting sutras. All the visitors, except the Christians, would come to kneel down and pay respect to the monks before they went on to do chores that the ritual leader assigned them with. Outside of the house, in the yard, the Protestant pastor was working on a coffin carved out of a piece of wood together with other villagers. He was there not only because he was a close neighbor but also because he was a good carpenter. I was told that the piece of wood was saved for his dad’s coffin but had to be used in this case for the son first. Others were preparing for the burial parade. Hundreds of bottles of alcohol and soda, together with tools for digging and carrying, were laid out. At the back of the house, a big pig was slaughtered. Next to them, three gigantic stoves were built. On top of each stove sat a big pot, one for rice, two others bubbling with chunks of pork with all the parts. Not one bit was wasted. One pot had blood in it and the other pot contained no blood. Seeing that, I must have looked puzzled, for the villagers explained, ‘The pot with no blood is for the wakupa, of course!’ Wakupa, literarily meaning men who sing, is the local term for Protestants. Due to the Protestant dietary restrictions, their food was prepared separately and they were offered soda instead of alcohol. 321

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Because the person did not die of natural causes, the body was to be buried right away, instead of three days later as what was normally observed.When the time appointed by the Nipa came, the ritual leader led several men to put the corpse into the coffin, straddled the coffin up and they all started carrying the corpse to the burial site, determined ahead of time by the Nipa. In this particular case, the burial site was only about a mile away from the house, on a slope overlooking the valley. Most of the relatives and fellow villagers, except extremely older men and children, followed them to the burial site.They sang and chatted along the way, taking a few breaks as they journeyed to the burial site. When they took breaks, they sat by the roadside and consumed all the drinks they brought with them. The non-Protestants drank alcohol and the Protestants drank soda. When they reached the burial site, the ritual leader directed the laying down of the coffin according to the instruction of the Nipa. I was told that the Nipa would be present in such moments, singing more songs. However, this time the Nipa injured his leg and couldn’t walk so far, so he stayed behind. The ritual leader took his place and directed the burial of the coffin. While the men were doing the digging and burying, the rest of the people sat by the slope and drank some more, until all the drinks were gone.Then the crowd came back to the house. I was instructed not to look back and not to answer if anyone called my name. Once we reached the house, everybody ran inside the house with the fire pit. A few old women stood at the door and pinched the ear of each person who came inside. All those gestures were supposed to keep the spirit of the deceased from following us back. While we were gone, the Buddhist monks finished their sutra chanting and conducted their services, responsible for both releasing the soul from suffering and preparing the soul for its reincarnation. Then it was time for the feast. Everybody got a big bowl and ate rice with pork stew. More alcohol/soda was consumed. Afterwards, people went back to their homes. After such a funeral, the village normally would go a few days without any celebrations. The Catholic rituals have a very different component, which is the mass. I witnessed the funeral of a deceased Catholic school teacher. He was of Nu Buddhist origin, but married to a Catholic Tibetan woman and converted. When I arrived at his funeral with a former colleague and friend of his from a different village, we were directed to the side room, where his body lay in the open-casket-style coffin. The coffin was covered by a piece of black cloth, with a white cross embroidered on it and a wooden cross on top of it. On the wall above his head was a picture of Jesus. Under the Jesus picture was a picture of the deceased, with candles lit in front of it. Next to his body was a table where a few family members, in this case his oldest son (a high school student), his wife, and his sister, sat. Benches were put at his feet so that visitors who came to pay respect could sit on the benches, drink alcohol, and chat with the family members.  Another colleague of the deceased was in charge of keeping a record of the gifts (mostly money in this case) the visitors brought. I noticed that there were many cars parked by the road and many people dressed like city folks. Because the deceased was a state employee, there was a secular state memorial service that was inserted before the religious ritual. It turned out that the city folks were from the county education bureau, who came for the memorial service. They made the oldest son of the deceased stand in front of their house carrying the picture of his father. He stood there somewhat awkwardly and did not really show any facial expression. While the standard mourning music played in a tape recorder, everybody was required to lower their head, remove their hats, and remain quiet for 3 minutes. Then the head of the Education Bureau read a short essay declaring what a great teacher the deceased had been.10 Afterwards, all the city folks left in their cars and the ritual leader gestured to the relatives and villagers that the death ritual had begun.

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As the ritual leader directed people to carry the coffin out to the yard, the Catholic priest who came from Sichuan11 immediately changed into his white robe. Followed by a self-organized choir, the priest stood next to the coffin and led a few songs.Then he started walking toward the church that happened to be next door, followed by the oldest son who was carrying the cross and crying inconsolably. Following the son was the coffin carried by several strong male villagers. After the coffin was parked in the middle of the church, the priest led the Mass of the Dead. Though they were welcome to participate in the mass and many did, most non-Catholics stayed outside of the church at this point, helping out with the cooking and the burial site as directed by the ritual leader. After the mass, everybody gathered again and started walking toward the burial site. Because this grave was going to be built with concrete on top of a mountain slope, each person was instructed to carry a brick with them to help build the grave.When we reached the burial site, the priest delivered a short sermon while the coffin was being laid down in the grave. When the villagers got to work under the instruction of the ritual leader, laying down bricks and filling the grave with concrete, the rest of the mourning crowd, regardless of religion or ethnicity, started consuming the drinks and snacks they had carried with them to the burial site. Some of them got drunk. When the grave site was finished, the crowd went down the mountain back to the house for a big feast that was prepared while everything was going on. This family was wealthier than the other family I described, so several pigs and many chickens were slaughtered for the meal. The feast consisted of a few dishes of meat and vegetables. Again, alcohol was served to all the non-Protestants. Tea and soda were served to Protestant relatives, friends, and fellow villagers. Once I was talking to a Catholic about the difference between being a Catholic, a Buddhist, and a Protestant. She said, Basically they are different in terms of what they do after a person dies. The Buddhists have to bring monks to recite sutras on the funeral, the Protestants just sing, and we have to have a priest to say a Mass for us. And the Buddhists need to summon monks again to have expensive rituals for three consecutive years. The Protestant never pay attention to their graves any more. We Catholics have to go to the grave to pay respect to the dead every year on the Tomb Sweeping Day.12 This remark is rather telling about how death rituals define the religious community and mark the boundaries between each other. However, the social parts of the rituals mandate that each and everyone, regardless of their religious or ethnic identities, must participate, side by side with people of different traditions, in the same ritual, connected by their relationship to the dead (based on emotional attachment or kinship ties) and the obligation to the larger communities (based on the village or township they live in) they belong to. Therefore, the death rituals are also penetrating the boundaries that they establish at the same time.

5 Conclusion In a pluralistic society such as Bingzhongluo, every individual interacts with a diversity of ethnic groups and religious communities on a daily basis. Even within one family, this diversity is experienced and expected, since intermarriages across ethnic or religious groups are frequent, with slightly harder boundaries posed by the latter. However, conversion from one religion to another is easy and takes place on a frequent basis, especially when marriages take place. Therefore, pluralism is not only an everyday reality, but also a mandate and social order.

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Bingzhongluo is a place of hardship, not only plagued by poverty and inaccessibility, but also haunted by frequent deaths that are caused by excessive alcohol consumption as well as geological features that pose physical dangers to human movements. Death rituals, therefore, are frequent occurrences that assume eminent roles in the public life. Not only do different religious communities define each other on the basis of their variant practices around death, but death also ‘enculturates’ individuals into how to live properly. Death is, by nature, boundary-making and boundary-crossing at the same time. On the one hand, death rituals have to help the deceased complete the transition from the living to the dead. On the other, death rituals have to mark the realms between the living and the dead, or rather, guard the realms of the living from the pollution of the dead. ‘Crossing over to the other side’ is both necessary and dangerous. That is why the ritual specialists are often endowed with power that is, at the same time, dangerous. Furthermore, death rituals are not only about individuals who have passed away, they are more about anxiety over regulating the world the living occupy – the reproduction of the social order. In a pluralistic society, the principle of pluralism is crucial to the social order. The story of Bingzhongluo demonstrates that death rituals help to maintain and reproduce the principle of pluralism through the way people are organized and socialized to act in the death ritual. The boundary-making aspect of death rituals organizes the people in Bingzhongluo by religious communities that are meaningful to their lives. However, it does not mean that religion is the crucial differentiating factor for death rituals. On the contrary, the rituals are very similar in their social and cultural aspects, as Unni Wikan argues in her comparison of Muslim bereavements in Egypt and Bali (1988). The similarity of the variant death rituals in Bingzhongluo lies in their boundary-crossing abilities which mandate each individual to enter into the worldviews of the other. Both maintaining and challenging the boundaries, making the boundaries real and yet permeable, the death rituals in Bingzhongluo are part and parcel of its pluralism. Key words: death, Sino-Burmese-Tibetan borderlands, boundaries, China, pluralism

Notes 1 A Brief Introduction of Bingzhongluo, a report published by the Bingzhongluo Township government, 2012. 2 The local government of Bingzhongluo reported over 7,700 pigs in 2011. 3 All the indigenous names are my phonetic recording of the names given in their own language since there are no standard Romanizations for these languages. 4 Some distinguish between Nipa and Nigupa for the Lisu, the former being the spirit medium and the latter being the ritual specialist who does not communicate with the spirits. 5 The Chinese sources often say that Fraser was assisted by a Lisu (Cao, 2001: p. 21), but according to David Bradley (2012), one of the persons who assisted Fraser in the creation of the Lisu orthography was Sara Ba Thaw, a Karen evangelist literate in both the Burmese and Lisu languages. 6 It is important to note that the Chinese government forbids anyone below 18 years of age to register with any formal religious organization. Therefore, those who are under 18 are not counted for membership. Furthermore, since Protestants are forbidden to drink or smoke in this area, drinking or smoking (or rather, the lack of drinking and smoking) have become clearer markers of Protestant affiliation over and above formal baptism. 7 All dates are according to Lunar calendar. 8 A note and tribute to James Scott’s theorization of the zomia: Falling right into where Scott calls the zomia (2009), Bingzhongluo is a kind of ‘convergence zone’ (Jinba, 2017). Whereas the zomia emphasizes resistance, Bingzhongluo embraces its marginality and celebrates its plurality. 9 These songs vary in different languages. Therefore, it can be argued that traditionally these death rituals mark ethnic boundaries. However, in today’s Bingzhongluo, the Nipa I interviewed claimed that it

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Death and life in a pluralistic society doesn’t matter which ethnic songs he sings since they all serve the same function. He was of Nu and Tibetan origin but was also invited to serve side by side with Buddhist monks at funerals. The Lisu call him Nipa and the Nu call him Namsa. 10 For a detailed description of memorial services for state employees or party members in China, see Liu (2015) and Tsai (2017). 11 Due to the shortage of priests in China, a priest only comes once a month or on important holidays or occasions like this. 12 Though the Tomb Sweeping Day is a Han Chinese festival of commemorating the dead, often associated with ancestor worship, Catholic missionaries in China were more interested in localization than the Protestant ones.

Further reading Mueggler, E. (2017) Songs for Dead Parents. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Seligman, A. B. and Weller, R. P. (2012) Rethinking Pluralism: Ritual, Experience, and Ambiguity. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wikan, U. (1990) Managing Turbulent Hearts: A Balinese Formula for Living. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bibliography Barth, F. (1969) Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Becker, E. (1997) The Denial of Death. New York: Free Press. Berger, P. L. (1969 [c1967]) The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Bloch, M. and Parry, J. (eds). (1982) Death and the Regeneration of Life. New York: Cambridge University Press. Bradley, D. and Sybesma R. (eds) (2012) Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics. Leiden: Brill. Lisu 傈僳語. Cann, C. K. (2015) ‘Responding Theologically to Contemporary Mourning,’ Cosmologics Magazine [online]. Available at: http://cosmologicsmagazine.com/candi-k-cann-responding-theologically-to-contempo rary-mourning/. [Accessed 20 October 2017]. Cao, Y. (2001) ‘Cross at the Cliff – Why the Lisu Convert to Christianity,’ Journal of Aba Teachers College, 26(1), pp. 20–24. Choi, M. (2017) Death Rituals and Politics in Northern Song China. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foster, D. A., Blowers, P. M., Dunnavant, A. L. and Williams, D. N. (eds). (2004) The Encyclopedia of the StoneCampbell Movement: Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Christian Churches/Churches of Christ, Churches of Christ. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Glavany, A. (2012) ‘Death and Ritual Wailing in Early China: Around the Funeral of Lao Dan,’ Asia Major, 25(2), pp. 15–42. Jinba, T. (2017) ‘Seeing like Borders: Convergence Zone as a Post-Zomian Model,’ Current Anthropology, 58(5), pp. 551–575. Lim, F. K. G. (2013) Christianity in Contemporary China: Socio-cultural Perspectives. London: Routledge. Liu, H. L. (2015) Dying Socialist in Capitalist Shanghai: Ritual, Governance, and Subject Formation in Urban China’s Modern Funeral Industry. PhD Dissertation, Boston University. Madsen, R. (1998) China’s Catholics:Tragedy and hope in an emerging civil society (Vol. 12). Berkeley: University of California Press. Mueggler, E. (2017) Songs for Dead Parents: Corpse, Text, and World in Southwest China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mullaney, T. S. (2011) Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nedostup, R. (2017) ‘Burying, Repatriating, and Leaving the Dead in Wartime and Postwar China And Taiwan, 1937–1955,’ Journal of Chinese History, 1(1), pp. 111–39. Scott, J. (2009) The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Keping Wu Seligman, A. B. and Weller, R. P. (2012) Rethinking Pluralism: Ritual, Experience, and Ambiguity. Oxford: Oxford University Pres. Seligman, A. B., et al. (2008) Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tapp, N. (2002) ‘In defence of the archaic: A reconsideration of the 1950s ethnic classification project in China,’ Asian Ethnicity, 3(1), pp. 63–84. Tsai, W.-H. (2017) ‘Framing the Funeral: Death Rituals of Chinese Communist Party Leaders,’ China Journal, 77, January, pp. 51–71. Uhalley, S. and Wu, X. (2001) China and Christianity: Burdened past, hopeful future. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Walter, T. (2014) ‘Sociological Perspectives,’ in: Stillion, J. M. and Attig, T. (eds). Death, Dying, and Bereavement: Contemporary Perspectives, Institutions, and Practices. New York, NY: Springer. Watson, J. L. and Rawski, E. S. (1988) Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wikan, U. (1988) ‘Bereavement and Loss in Two Muslim Communities: Egypt and Bali Compared,’ Social Science & Medicine, 27(5), pp. 451–60. Yang, B. (2009) Between Winds and Clouds: The Making of Yunnan (Second Century bce – 20th Century ce). New York: Columbia University Press. Yang, J. (2012) ‘The Benefits of Religious Tolerance from Daily Interactions among Different Ethnic Groups – Case studies from Bingzhongluo of Gongshan County of Nujiang Prefecture,’ Journal of Yunnan Minzu University, 29. Zhou, S. (2009) Funeral Rituals in Eastern Shandong, China: An Anthropological Study. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.

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26 VIKING DEATH Pre-Christian rites of passage and funerary feasting Davide M. Zori

1 Introduction The Viking Age (ca. ad 790–1100) saw Scandinavians raiding, trading, and settling across large portions of Europe, the North Atlantic, and south along the Russian rivers towards the Byzantine and Muslim worlds. In ad 921, an Arab ambassador from Baghdad named Ahmad ibn Fadlan encountered a group of merchant Vikings on the Volga river as he was travelling north from the Caspian Sea. He called them Russiyah (Rus).1 These Scandinavian traders played a pivotal role in the exchange network known as the ‘Northern Arc,’ which connected the Caliphate of Baghdad with Western Europe. Ibn Fadlan and his patrons in Baghdad were therefore interested in understanding the Rus people. He spent time with the Rus Vikings, observing and recording their cultural practices. One event in particular attracted his attention: the death of a chieftain. Ibn Fadlan’s careful description of the chieftain’s funeral is an unparalleled source for understanding pre-Christian rituals of death and burial among the Vikings. The setting was an extended feast with excessive consumption, elaborate ritual, and unsettling violence. Culminating in the conflagration of the chieftain aboard his ship laden with grave goods and the body of a sacrificial victim, these events were highly public and included wide participation among the community of Scandinavian Rus. Recorded for posterity by ibn Fadlan, the oral and material statements articulated during the death feast and subsequent burial of the Rus chieftain were consciously constructed as a performance in a theater of death. Across the vast extent of the Viking world, pre-Christian mortuary contexts reveal a considerable degree of variability in ritual practice that included both cremation (burned) and inhumation (unburned) burials. Nevertheless, a unified and overarching vocabulary unites the mortuary practices of pagan Viking Age Scandinavians. Ibn Fadlan’s account provides one of the most detailed descriptions of Viking death rituals, particularly as viewed by a cultural outsider. Throughout this chapter, I use his narrative as a framework and then broaden my geographic, temporal, and cultural scope by drawing on archaeology and Norse literature for insights into ancient Scandinavian rituals of death. I argue that consideration of the Viking funeral as an elaborate rite of passage illuminates Viking Age Scandinavian conceptions of the transition from death to the afterlife. In his seminal work, Arnold van Gennep (1908) stressed the importance of the rites of passage that accompany individuals as they pass from one stage of life to another. Death constitutes the final transition. Van Gennep understood the rites of passage as being 327

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tripartite, involving separation, transition, and incorporation. He saw specific rituals accompanying each stage: pre-liminal rites separate the individual from a previous social role; liminal rites mark the transition; and post-liminal rites incorporate the individual into their new social world (van Gennep, 1908: pp. 11, 21). Funerals encompass all three rites: separation, transition, and (re)-incorporation. Although rites of separation may appear to be most logical for funerals, van Gennep (1908: p. 146) saw the rites of transition and incorporation as subject to a greater degree of elaboration cross-culturally. I will emphasize a particular Viking preoccupation with the successful navigation of the state of liminality, wherein the deceased person exists between this life and the next.This phase involves heightened contact with the world of the dead. This contact offers opportunities to harness otherworldly forces, but the connection to the other world is also dangerous as the world of the dead can threaten the living. Death also removes a member of the community of the living. For the Viking Age, I will highlight the group formation imagery of the feast as a key to reconstituting (re-incorporating) the community in the wake of a member’s death. This chapter progresses in stages through the Viking death rituals according to the tripartite rites of passage. For each stage, I begin with ibn Fadlan’s account of the chieftain’s burial before drawing analogies from archaeological evidence, rune stones, and Old Norse written sources.2 These comparisons reveal broad commonalities in Viking conceptions of how the dead transition through a liminal existence into the next world. Simultaneously, the comparisons also highlight the variability with which this transformation was expressed and given material form within the Viking Age rites of passage. I’ll show how these diverse rituals – structured by common Viking ideals of hospitality, feasting, and reciprocal exchange – gave access to multiple Viking afterlives.

2  Viking pre-liminal rites of separation from the living Ibn Fadlan's account reveals that the chieftain’s physical death only initiated his separation from the living. The Rus on the Volga began their funerary ritual by interring their dead chieftain in a temporary grave constructed from a subterranean chamber covered by a wooden roof and earth. He remained there for ten days while they prepared his funeral clothes, burial ship, and provisions for his final interment. The rites of separation occur in this temporary grave. The chieftain was physically separated from the living for ten days, although his worldly needs for nourishment and entertainment persisted: ‘They had put nabīdh [wine or other strong drink] in the tomb with him, and fruit, and a drum’ (Lunde and Stone, 2012: p. 51). In death – as they had in life – Viking chieftains laid claim to personal loyalty through gift giving and feasting (Zori et al., 2013). Ibn Fadlan records that feasting both materially and symbolically accompanied the burial of the dead. The feast is a separation rite that eases the beginning of the deceased’s social transition between life and death. A third of the deceased chieftain’s wealth was spent procuring alcoholic beverages consumed prior to and during his cremation. Ibn Fadlan elaborates on these drinking parties: ‘They drink nabīdh unrestrainedly, night and day, so that sometimes one of them dies with a wine cup in his hand’ (Lunde and Stone, 2012: p. 49). We can assume that his kin, successors, and supporters were responsible for organizing the death feast (Grøvnik, 1982), however, throughout this death feast, the dead chieftain maintained the symbolic role of the feast-giver.3 The dead chieftain symbolically hosted this final feast for his own remembrance, as well as for the socio-political benefit of his successor and kin, who were to inherit his wealth and status. After ten days, the Rus removed the earth and wooden roof to exhume their chieftain from his first grave. Having drawn his ship ashore and secured it on a wooden scaffolding, they transferred their chieftain to a second burial place inside a tent aboard his ship. The Rus placed him 328

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in a seated position supported by pillows to make him appear to be alive and hosting the revelry. Food and alcohol surrounded him and represented his prominent engagement with his community in his final feast. The account continues: Then they brought nabīdh, fruit and basil which they placed near him. Next they carried in bread, meat and onions which they laid before him. After that, they brought in a dog, which they cut in two and threw into the boat. Then they placed his weapons beside him. Next they took two horses and made them run until they were in lather, before hacking them to pieces with swords and throwing their flesh on to the boat. Then they brought two cows, which they also cut into pieces and threw them on to the boat. Finally they brought a cock and a hen, killed them and threw them on to the boat as well. Lunde and Stone, 2012: p. 51 Biological death comes quickly, but social death – particularly for a leader or other important personage in a social group – has drawn-out and dramatic repercussions for the community of the living.Van Gennep’s rites of transition embody the structuralist binary opposition of a social ‘death’ in one life stage and a subsequent ‘birth’ into the next (Metcalf and Huntington, 1991: p. 30). For the Rus, the proper management of this transition included ritual juxtaposition of stark symbols of life, death, and rebirth.The symbolic reference to life and death included shows of vitality, such as the running of the horses, immediately followed by their bloody sacrifice and dismemberment. The Rus then deposited the horse flesh on the chieftain’s boat. The horses, large vivacious animals, were symbols of fertility in Scandinavian culture. Other animals serving as props in the theatrical death rites also referenced fertility, such as the paired cock and hen that were killed together and thrown aboard the funeral ship. The Rus deposited sacrificed animals on the chieftain’s boat to channel their reproductive capacities towards the chieftain’s rebirth into his next life. The sacrifices ease the transition. The Rus enacted the vitality needed for rebirth into the next life through human as well as animal sacrifices. Before the animals were slaughtered, a slave girl volunteered to accompany her master into the afterlife. Afterwards she was attended by two female ritual specialists while singing and drinking alcohol liberally. Ibn Fadlan’s account describes how she entered the tents of the chieftain’s supporters, each of whom had intercourse with her and repeated the ritualized phrase: ‘Tell your master that I only did this for your love of him’ (Lunde and Stone, 2012: p. 52). She bore the virility of these supporters to the chieftain’s grave and into the next world. Aboard the funeral ship, the progression of sacrifices culminated in the gruesome death of the slave girl. The female slave – sacrificed as the chieftain’s ritual mate – was the ultimate fertility symbol and bearer of reproductive capacity conveyed into the next world. Aboard the ship, an old woman called the Angel of Death urged the slave girl to drink more alcohol (nabīdh), after which the girl grew very intoxicated and approached the chieftain’s burial tent aboard the ship. The Angel of Death dragged the girl inside the tent, where six of the chieftain’s supporters had intercourse with the slave girl while other men beat weapons on their shields, making a great noise – possibly to drown out her cries and/or to heighten the ritual tension. Inside the tent, the men used rope to strangle the girl while the Angel of Death stabbed her repeatedly in the chest. The burial ship was then set ablaze. Excavated graves from across the Viking world – especially those of the wealthy segment of society – complement ibn Fadlan’s account. The archaeological evidence shows an attention to the mode by which the deceased pass into the next world. Bodies were often placed, for instance, in ships, boats, or carts. The items deposited in the grave alongside the dead reinforced 329

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ideal identities and social roles. Male leadership status was underscored with weapons, shields, and drinking equipment. Female elite status was reinforced with items such keys, jewelry, storage chests, and weaving equipment. Moving from objects representing status ideals to the reconstruction of rituals poses an interpretive challenge. Nevertheless, the rites of passage are discernable in archaeological burial assemblages. This is particularly the case for evidence of funerary feasting. Objects used for food and drink consumption as well as actual food remains make up a large portion of the grave goods from burials of both males and females. This evidence points to the symbolic importance of feasting in death rites and provides practical insights into the types of foods and beverages considered appropriate for death feasts. Diagnostic Viking feasting equipment includes drinking vessels such as drinking horns, glass cups, beakers, and mixing bowls. The Scandinavian Viking Age elite ship burials like Ladby in Denmark and Oseberg in Norway contain further references to feasting, with particularly striking evidence of animal sacrifice and meat consumption. In the rich Oseberg burial, for example, excavators found an ox, four dogs, and fifteen decapitated horses with their heads piled together toward the front of the ship (Brøgger and Schetelig, 1928). The back of the deck where the ox was found was equipped for food preparation with two large cauldrons and an iron tripod for boiling meat. In ibn Fadlan’s observations of the Rus funeral, two horses feature prominently, but as discussed above these horses were not eaten as part of the feast. Instead, I interpreted them as symbols of virility that emphasized the chieftain’s status in life, while their sacrifice channeled the fertility towards the chieftain’s rebirth. Horses appear frequently in Viking graves and in some wealthy inhumation graves, the sheer quantity of sacrificed horses is arresting.The fifteen decapitated horses excavated within the Oseberg burial are noteworthy, although not unique. The Ladby ship burial included eleven horses placed in the prow of the ship (Sørensen, 2001: pp. 62, 63). The absence of evidence for butchery supports the notion that these horses were not primarily meant as food for funerary feasting at the time of burial. Rather, their killing probably combines symbolic sacrifice and conspicuous destruction of resources for status display. Horses appear to have been particularly suitable for inclusion in funerary contexts (Sikora, 2003; Leifsson, 2012). Horses are a means of transport to the next world, just as the ships, boats, and carts also placed in graves. Scenes on Viking Age picture stones from Gotland in which mounted figures are welcomed into Valhalla support the notion that horses provided transport both to and in the afterlife (Figures 26.1A and B). However, twelve or fifteen horses are beyond what could be useful for travelling to the afterlife.This number of horses is also more than either the Ladby man or the Oseberg lady could need personally in the afterlife. There must be other factors as well. Horses might also have provided social capital in the next life. Although possession of horses provided a measure of affluence, wealth in the Viking world was more commonly reckoned in cattle. The horses in the Oseberg burial accompany a female, not a male, which complicates both the interpretation that horses symbolized mounted elite warriors, as well as the association between specifically male and equine virility. The symbolic meanings of horses deposited in graves are most likely variable and the meanings may well incorporate one or multiple of the explanations discussed above. I favor such multivariate explanations that recognize that the killing of these large, strong, and quick animals, with expressive eyes and manes of flowing hair, are expensive sacrifices as well as impactful props in the theater of death, channeling reproductive capacity towards the rebirth of the deceased. Good portions of animal bones uncovered in burial assemblages do represent food. In contrast to most horse skeletons found in graves, other animal bones in inhumation graves often show evidence of dismemberment and butchery. It is often unclear, however, whether funerary 330

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Figure 26.1 A & B Two picture stones from the Swedish island of Gotland: (A) Alskog Tjängvide I and (B) Lärbro Tängelgårda I. Ships are a common feature on the bottom panels of Gotlandic picture stones whereas other panels often contain scenes of processions (possibly funerary) and scenes of welcome (probably into the afterlife). Both stones show scenes with riders being welcomed – presumably into the afterlife – by female figures who hold up drinking horns (images from Lindqvist, 1941: Fig. 137 [Taf. 57] and Fig. 86 [Taf. 31], with kind permission from Wahlström, Widstrand, and Kungl. Vitterhetsakademien).

feasters consumed the meat before placing the bones into the grave or whether the animal remains were intended for consumption in the next life.The distinction is difficult to draw based on animal bones alone. The excavators of the ship burial recently discovered in Salme, Estonia, acknowledged this challenge, noting that ‘Animal bones (a few pig bones and lots of sheep, goat and cattle bones) at the site may have resulted from a funeral feast or been left as food for the afterlife’ (Price et al., 2016: p. 1023). A third possibility – addressed more fully below – is that the meat may have been meant for consumption in the limbo-like state of existence within the grave. Modern broad-scale excavations of the areas surrounding grave pits have begun to illuminate the intricate funerary rituals – including the sacrifice and consumption of animals – that took place in Viking cemeteries. Excavation of areas around burials has revealed cemetery landscapes including superstructures, walls, and pits that show activities at the graveside. Archaeological 331

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Figure 26.2 A Gotlandic picture stone, Lärbro Tängelgårda IV, showing a probable funerary feast.The men inside the possible funerary superstructure in the bottom left corner may either be holding items for processing alcohol or drinking horns that are tipped upside down. A comparable scene containing a similar superstructure with two figures inside can also be seen in the top panel of the Lärbro Tängelgårda I stone in Figure 26.1.B (image from Lindqvist, 1941: Fig. 91 [Taf. 36], with kind permission from Wahlström, Widstrand, and Kungl.Vitterhetsakademien).

investigation of these features outside of the burials themselves is a relatively recent methodological practice. As Ljungkvist (2008: p. 34) observes for the Valsgärde cemetery, which was excavated mostly in the early twentieth century, features other than graves were ‘hardly . . . a priority during excavations.’ One exception at the Valsgärde cemetery was a nine meter-long symbolic ship setting made up of fourteen standing posts, representing the sides of the ship. Although the ship predates the Viking period, the ship setting appears to have played a role as part of the Viking burial landscape, as human bones were interred later in a pit in the middle of the ship (Ljungkvist, 2008: pp. 35, 36).The interpretation of multi-phased and multi-functional cemetery features, such as the Valgärde ship setting, is challenging. Nevertheless, recent interpretive work 332

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on features in multiple cemeteries convincingly argues for the presence of funerary houses (or canopies) meant to display the dead body (Gardeła, 2016: p. 188). These temporary structures may also have been the loci of funerary feasting, or the production of a funerary ale or mead. Participants in funeral feasts drank memorial ale, or other types of alcoholic beverages such as wine, mead, or the Rus nabīdh, from a variety of vessels that ranged widely in form and material. The vessels described in texts, depicted in art, and found in graves are typically special drinking vessels meant to indicate status. These status-bearing drinking vessels include drinking horns, glass beakers, and silver cups. Possibly the most evocative is the drinking horn. Drinking horns presumably used in funerary feasting accompanied the dead in graves, including the Oseberg ship burial in Norway and the so-called Black Grave in Ukraine. Drinking horns are depicted in use on Gotlandic picture stones, such as Lärbro Tängelgårda IV (Figure 26.2). The Lärbro Tängelgårda IV stone, possibly a commemorative monument to a dead chieftain, depicts figures using drinking horns in a formalized ritual scene that likely represents a funerary drinking feast. Lärbro Tängelgårda IV probably depicts a funeral, with two bearded men inside what could be a temporary structure in a cemetery. These two figures hold objects that look like upside-down drinking horns poised for plunging into a communal drink storage vessel, although this interpretation must be tempered by the fact that the vessels do not curve like typical drinking horns. Conversely, each man could be holding a press or grinding object for preparing the alcohol for a funerary feast.Together with the archaeological evidence and the written records, the Gotlandic picture stones show funerary drama styled as a feast that allows the enactment of social power among the living, with the dead playing an active role in the unfolding of the political theater. The role of the recently deceased is particularly powerful as a link between two worlds. It is to this role of the dead as powerful liminal beings that we turn in the next section.

3  Viking liminal rites of transition from this world to the next Ibn Fadlan’s account of the Rus funeral on the banks of the Volga river describes a second grave aboard the beached ship. This second grave provides the setting for the rites of transition that culminate in cremation and the quick transfer of the chieftain through the liminal stage. The chieftain is neither living, nor fully dead during the liminal stage; he has departed from the living but has not taken up his new home in the afterlife. Ibn Fadlan describes this new home in the afterlife using the Islamic conception: paradise. As the chieftain’s funeral ship blazes, a Rus participant explains to ibn Fadlan, ‘we burn them [in the fire] in an instant, so that at once without delay they enter Paradise.’ Ibn Fadlan is puzzled when the Rus man begins to laugh. The Rus man explains: ‘His Lord, for love of him, has sent a wind that will bear him hence within the hour’ (Lunde and Stone, 2012: p. 54). The ongoing feast at the graveside provided a background ritual bridging the gap between separation and liminality. Through the funerary feast, the chieftain and his material goods are destroyed; the feasters consume the chieftain’s worldly resources while the chieftain’s body is consumed on the pyre. The Rus completed the ritual by constructing an earthen mound over the cremation assemblage and raising a large wooden post bearing the name of the deceased chieftain. The Rus man’s statement that cremation immediately brings the chieftain to paradise echoes cross-cultural concerns about the dangers of the liminal state between death and the afterlife. The spirit is gone but the body remains behind to decay slowly. Cross-culturally, many societies share the basic belief that the transfer of a dead person’s soul to the afterlife cannot take place until the body has reached a point of stasis, where it is no longer undergoing the physical changes that accompany death and decomposition (Hertz, 1960). For some past cultures, stability was reached through mummification or exposure of the corpse to natural forces until only 333

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the dry and unchanging bones remained (see Hertz, 1960 and examples in Parker Pearson, 2000: pp. 45–71). The Viking Rus on the Volga were not unaware of the transformations in the chieftain prior to his cremation. While still in his first chamber grave and before he was moved to the ship, the chieftain began his bodily transition by changing color, a clear sign of his liminal status: ‘He had turned black. . . . The dead man did not smell bad and nothing about him had changed except the color’ (Lunde and Stone, 2012: p. 51). In the Norse sagas, the color of death is blá (blue/ black). The blá skin of the dead marked their status as at least partially removed from the world of the living. During the transition, dangers can arise both for the dead and for the living. Ibn Fadlan’s Rus informant knew the danger of prolonged liminality both for the chieftain’s successful transition and for his society in general. He mocked ibn Fadlan: ‘You Arabs are fools! . . . You put the men you love most, [and the most noble among you] into the earth, and the earth and worms and insects eat them’ (Lunde and Stone, 2012: p. 54). By contrast, the Rus Vikings chose cremation to quickly render their chieftain’s corpse into the stable form of ash and dry bone fragments, and thus free his soul to enter the afterlife. When a member of society dies, both the dead and the living pass through a liminal period; the body of the dead undergoes the biological processes of decay, while the living mourn the dead. This period requires rituals of transition that culminate in the integration of the dead into the afterlife and re-integration of the mourners into a society reconstituted without the social persona of the deceased. Successful passage through the transition facilitated by right ritual avoids the dangers inherent in the liminal phase. For the Vikings, a safe journey through liminality often involved a mode of transportation and sustenance for the journey.The ship and the horse have been addressed above, and to this, we can add the cart and even skis (Davidson, 1943; Brøgger and Schetelig, 1928). The journey to the afterlife involves the crossing of a symbolic threshold between this life and the next, although the time this crossing requires varies: it can be instant, as with ibn Fadlan’s cremated chieftain, or as long as the time it takes for a body to decay. Van Gennep (1908: p. 21) articulated threshold or doorway rites as ‘rites of preparation for union, themselves preceded by rites of preparation for the transitional stage.’ For van Gennep (1908: p. 20), ‘to cross the threshold is to unite oneself with a new world.’ Archaeologically, large post holes on either side of doorways leading into Viking Age grave mounds have been identified at sites such as Helgö and Åby in Sweden. Eriksen (2013) has suggested that ritual processions may have carried the dead through these ‘portals’ to symbolically transition from the world of the living into the world of the dead inside the mound.The Gotlantic picture stones discussed above may also be symbolic thresholds, especially in light of the distinctive form of the type C stones (ad 800–1000) that mimic the shape of a door (Arrhenius, 1970; Andrén, 1993: pp. 35, 36; Andreeff, 2007: pp. 252–254; Eriksen, 2013: pp. 195, 196). Some picture stones actually appear to have been placed above cremation graves (Andreef, 2012: pp. 142, 143), while others mark transitions in the landscape, such as between cultivated infields and grazed outfields (Andrén, 1993). Such positioning is consistent with the interpretation of picture stones as passageways across transitions and into other worlds. Van Gennep’s rites of the threshold are strikingly evident in the Rus funerary ritual. Ibn Fadlan’s account indicates that Viking Rus used the door symbol explicitly in their funerary ritual. His account relates that ‘they led the slave girl towards something which they had constructed which looked like the frame of a door. She placed her feet on the palms of the hands of the men, until she could look over this frame’ (Lunde and Stone, 2012: p. 52). Before entering the ship – the vehicle for transport to the next world – the girl must cross a symbolic threshold (see Eriksen, 2013 on thresholds).The male participants lifted her three times to look over the frame 334

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into the other world. The first time she is lifted she says, ‘There I see my father and my mother’; the second time she says, ‘There I see all my dead relatives sitting’; and on the third lift, ‘There I see my master sitting in Paradise and Paradise is green and beautiful. There are men with him and young people, and he is calling me. Take me to him’ (Lunde and Stone, 2012: p. 52). The slave girl, already in a liminal state amplified by intoxication, relates the images of the chieftain in the afterlife that appear to blend the ritual present (e.g. the chieftain calling her) with the ritual future (e.g. the chieftain’s presence in paradise). The images are positive and indicative of a successful transfer of the chieftain’s spirit into the next world, presumably partially dependent on the imminent ritual union of the slave girl with the chieftain and the destruction of both of their physical bodies during the conflagration of the burial ship.4 This chapter’s next section turns to existences of the dead that come after society has sent – or attempted to send – the dead into their next life. Incorporation into the next life is only sometimes a straightforward matter, not only because the rituals must be right, but also because there are several different possible destinations for the soul of the deceased. Occasionally, the dead do not agree with the destination that the living intend for them.

4  Viking post-liminal rites of incorporation into multiple afterlives The Rus in ibn Fadlan’s story anticipate that the chieftain’s transition is complete when they build a commemorative mound over the cremation site. However, the difficulty of confirming the successful completion of incorporation into the afterlife leaves space for fear of failure’s ramifications. Although ibn Fadlan’s account terminates with the mound construction, we can turn to Old Norse literature and archaeology to examine the post-liminal stage of the Viking rites of passage. Post-death and post-liminal existence appears to have had multiple possible outcomes. Failure to apply appropriate rituals or failed rituals can result in the dead inhabiting semi-permanent liminal states. These liminal dead, who have not fully crossed over into their next life, could be dangerous for the living. However, as we shall see, not all of the dead who inhabit this earth were threatening. The notion of multiple conceptions of the afterlife should perhaps not seem so strange.Van Gennep (1908: p. 146) explains, ‘Within a single people there are several contradictory or different conceptions of the afterworld which may become intermingled with one another, so that their confusion is reflected in the rites.’ Old Norse texts and archaeological remains support this idea of multiple Viking conceptions of the afterlife. The most common modern conception of the Viking afterlife draws from the traditions of Odin’s hall of Valhalla in sources like The Prose Edda (Byock, 2005) and The Poetic Edda (Hollander, 2004). In these texts, warrior males join Odin’s retinue in daytime battle and nightly feasting. Feasting in the hall of Valhalla is a rite of incorporation into their afterlife. They reiterate the rite nightly. After the warriors hack each other to pieces on the battlefield, they are reincorporated into Odin’s retinue by sharing in communal drink and food in his hall. But Valhalla is just one hall among many halls in Ásgard, the land of the gods. The sources speak of other possible destinations. For instance, the fertility goddess Freyja is said to have a claim to half the warrior dead, although no source tells us what happens in Freyja’s hall. In general, we know little of where women go after they die. Less fortunate dead males who fail to die on the battlefield risk joining the ghastly Hel in the underworld, which takes her name. The view from the Eddas of two diametrically opposed afterlives in Ásgard and Hel, in which the dead await a final confrontation at Ragnarok, can be seen as a united belief system. However, the narrative sources that are not explicitly eschatological as well as the archaeological materials suggest additional and seemingly contradictory notions of the afterlife. A very clear contrast exists for instance between the quick transfer of the soul to the 335

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afterlife recommended in ibn Fadlan’s account (mirrored in archaeological cremation graves) and the mound-dwellers of the sagas (mirrored in some of the archaeological chamber graves). The rite of cremation described by ibn Fadlan was a common mode of burial for Scandinavians of the Viking Age. Snorri Sturluson’s mythic-legendary Ynglinga saga reflects back on the pagan period from thirteenth century Christian Iceland and includes an attempt to understand the rite of cremation. In the deep past, Odin ‘ordered that all the dead were to be burned on a pyre together with their possessions, saying that everyone would arrive in Vallholl [Valhalla] with such wealth as he had with him on his pyre’ (Hollander, 1964: pp. 11, 12). Ynglinga saga recounts that Odin himself was burned after he died and that ‘it was people’s belief that the higher the smoke rose into the sky, the more elevated in heaven would he be who was cremated’ (Hollander, 1964: p. 13). Odin’s mandate for cremation is consistent with the Rus man’s argument that cremation transfers the dead quickly to paradise. Ynglinga saga provides the further indication that ‘riches’ – surely including objects, food, animals, and slaves – that were destroyed as part of death rituals (cremation or interment) would be useful for the chieftain in his next life. Cremation graves involve quick destruction of the deceased and their grave assemblages. Perhaps this was the ideal way to send someone as quickly as possible to an afterlife that was far removed from the living. The food burned in cremation graves was most likely meant for an afterlife beyond the grave. On the other hand, food placed in inhumation graves opens the possibility that the food was meant to stay in the grave, and have a function in this world. This possibility is raised by the Icelandic sagas, which describe cases where characters hear noises of feasting and singing from inside burial mounds. In fact, these mound-dwellers are often very much alive and even corporeal in their afterlife. Old Norse sagas are rife with the dangerous un-dead. Having failed to cross over to the next world, these undead haunt the living. In the Norse tradition, these wandering undead are corporeal, meaning that the soul and the body are still united and so the deceased can still act in the physical world. Such beings, characterized by Victor Turner (1969: p. 95) as ‘threshold people,’ are dangerous because they are ‘neither here nor there’ in the social categories typical of most cultures.Van Gennep (1908: p. 160) holds that those who have not had funeral rites performed are usually perceived as ‘the most dangerous dead.’ These dead do not pass successfully into the designated afterlife, but instead desire re-integration into the world of the living.They are hostile and aggressive towards the living because they cannot fully re-enter the world of the living.Van Gennep (1908: pp. 160, 161) explains, ‘They lack the means of subsistence which the other dead find in their own world and consequently must obtain them at the expense of the living.’ These homeless dead are wanderers, rising from their bodily resting places to roam the landscape and threaten the homes of the living. The Viking ghost stories shed light on the fears and potential results of an unsuccessful transition to next world. Grettir’s saga tells of the revenant Glam, who posthumously caused the desertion of an entire valley (Zori and Byock, 2009). After Glam’s death, the local community failed to arrange proper destruction of Glam’s corpse and did not perform the rites of passage necessary to allow Glam’s spirit to pass beyond the state of liminality. Following van Gennep’s principles of the vengeful undead consuming the livelihood of the living, Glam killed both livestock and humans as part of his hauntings. The hauntings ceased only after the monster-slaying Grettir the Strong decapitated Glam and followed a clearly insulting yet ritual action to destroy the body: He cut off Glam’s head, placing it against his buttocks. . . .They set to work and burned Glam, until only his cold ashes remained. Then they carried the ashes in a skin bag, burying them at a place farthest from where people would go or livestock might graze. Byock, 2009: p. 102 336

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Viking Age archaeological examples of unusually treated inhumations appear to show parallel cases of ritualized solutions for controlling the dangerous dead. In their graves, potentially dangerous dead people are often treated differently: geographically excluded from formalized cemeteries, physically held down, or decapitated. A possible parallel to Glam’s decapitation in Grettir’s saga might be the woman placed with a knife and a few beads in Grave T in the Bogøvej cemetery in Denmark. Sometime after her initial burial, people broke into her grave, severed her head from her body and placed the skull and her purposefully broken mandible on top of her left leg (Gardeła, 2013: p. 114). In another Danish case, a ritually powerful and potentially dangerous individual may have been physically restrained in her grave. The woman buried in Grave A505 at Trekroner-Grydehøj was inhumed richly with a storage chest, knives, a bucket, a horse, a dog, and an iron-tipped bronze staff that has been interpreted as a magic staff. Her role as a magic-wielder may have encouraged people to cover her grave with stones and to place the largest of the stones immediately on top of her head to hold her down (Gardeła, 2013: p. 118). Several Viking Age rune stones – some of which are directly associated with graves – have magical texts meant to communicate with the dead in their grave. In an echo of the Bogøvej grave, a monumental ninth century rune stone from Malt in Denmark includes the preventative phrase ‘denial-of-walking’ probably meant to keep the commemorated individual from leaving his grave (Macleod and Mees, 2006: pp. 221, 222).The Malt stone was not found associated with a grave, but two other Danish rune stones from Nørre-Nærå and Gørlev were (Macleod and Mees, 2006: pp. 220 221). The texts on these two stones include the mirroring phrases ‘make good use of this monument’ and ‘make very good use of the monument.’ Macleod and Mees (2006: p. 220) see these texts as meant to ‘ensure that the dead were never able to leave their graves.’ The phrasing from the Gørlev stone is followed by the formula ‘thistle, mistletoe, casket,’ which Macleod and Mees interpret as binding magic meant to keep the dead in the grave. It seems possible, however, that the ‘make good use of the monument phrase’ was meant literally, especially in light of saga examples of the dead doing just that without being particularly bothersome for the living. We turn now to evidence of a not unpleasant afterlife within grave mounds. In some cases, the dead continue living a corporeal existence inside their burial mounds, with the resting place of the soul being the grave itself. Such a haugbui (mound-dweller) might meddle with the affairs of men, but not in a universally destructive manner. The hero Grettir confronts a mound-dweller nicknamed Kar the Old who is haunting a Norwegian district in an attempt to increase the power of his son. Grettir breaks into the house-like chamber grave within Kar’s burial mound. The saga describes the inside of the grave as a blend of feasting hall and treasure chamber: Grettir then descended into the mound. It was dark inside, and not altogether sweetsmelling. He had to feel around to get an idea of what was inside. He found some horse bones, and next bumped into the back-posts of a seat. He realized that a man was sitting in the chair. There was a great pile of gold and silver all mixed together. Byock, 2009: p. 52 Grettir intended to steal the treasure, but as he pulled himself out of the mound ‘something strong grabbed ahold of him’ (Byock, 2009: p. 52). An epic fight ensues that breaks apart the contents of the chamber grave. The revenant Kar is, like Glam, only overcome after Grettir performs performs the ritual act of decapitation followed by placing the severed head against the dead man’s buttocks. In cases where the soul continues to inhabit the grave, the burial is itself the rite of incorporation (see van Gennep, 1908: p. 163) and the transition rites blend into the incorporation rites, 337

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as the dead continue to inhabit the world of the living in a semi-permanent liminal state. Since the living may visit the dead, who continue to have some worldly needs, the dead and the living can continue to share in communal meals (van Gennep, 1908: p. 163). The state can be permanent.The state can also be semi-permanent in cases where the interaction between the dead and the living eventually ends. If the afterlife in the burial is a semi-permanent liminal state, then the deceased transitions into the afterlife after the last commemorative visit or meal. Ynglinga saga offers a mythic story of King Frey, who in life assured the fertility of his lands. After his death, his supporters hid his death from the wider population by interring his body in a house-like chamber grave inside a burial mound, complete with a door and three windows. His supporters pour tribute of gold, silver, and copper in through the windows in order to assure peace and good seasons (Hollander, 1964: p. 14).These rituals bridge the gap between van Gennep’s liminal and post-liminal rites. In his grave, King Frey is socially very much alive while his veneration continues. In cases of particularly important social beings – like kings or lineage founders – the living choose to extend the period of liminality for the dead through active veneration. Frey’s veneration does eventually cease – although the saga does not tell us exactly when – ending one post-death existence for King Frey and beginning another in which he is first socially more distant and then absent from the living. In Norse literature, mound-dwellers might simply proceed happily with their semipermanent liminal existence of peaceful merrymaking similar to the joys of the pre-liminal life. The most joyous of these involved feasting, drinking, and singing. This not-so-unhappy fate befalls Gunnar of Hliðarendi in Njál’s saga who is overheard enjoying himself by passersby: ‘It happened that a shepherd and a servant woman were driving cattle past Gunnar’s mound. Gunnar seemed to them to be in high spirits and reciting verses in the mound’ (Cook, 2001: p. 129). In this state, the dead sometimes offered good guidance to the living. In the second sighting of Gunnar, his son Hogni and his friend Skarphedin, who are undecided about how to respond in a bloodfeud, look towards the mound illuminated in the moonlight shining through the clouds: ‘It appeared to them that the mound was open, and that Gunnar had turned around and was looking at the moon . . . They saw Gunnar was happy and had a cheerful look’ (Cook, 2001: p. 130). Gunnar recites a poem in which he advises action against their opponents: ‘The shieldholding ghost [vættidraugr] would sooner wear his helmet high than falter in the fray, rather die for battle-Freyja’ (Cook, 2001: p. 130; Sveinsson, 1954: p. 193).5 Although Gunnar appears happy, he seems alone. Existence within a burial mound after death need not be a solitary experience. Eyrbyggja saga tells of Thorstein Cod-biter who, after dying at sea, joined a feasting-group of the dead inside the distinctive natural hill called Helgafell (Holy Mountain). Thorstein takes his place in the high-seat as the leader of this company of undead revelers: Thorstein’s shepherd was rounding up his sheep north of Helgafell when he saw the northern side of the mountain open up. He saw great fires burning inside and heard the sound of feasting (Old Norse “glaum og hornaskvǫl,” Sveinsson and Þórðarson 1935: p. 19) and good cheer.When he listened closely, he heard that Thorstein Cod-biter and his men were being welcomed there and that Thorstein was being told to sit in the high seat opposite his father. Quinn, 1997: p. 138 Hornasvǫl – the word that Quinn translates as feasting – is a drinking bout using drinking horns or literally, the noise made with drinking horns.The feasting unit inside the holy mountain may therefore be engaged in a feast for the newly arrived Thorstein who takes the seat of honor at 338

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his own death feast.This feast of the dead occurs at the end of his transition to the afterlife and as such comprises a rite of incorporation into his new social group.The death feast with the living, such as the feast ibn Fadlan observes, marks the Rus chieftain’s departure from earthly existence, while the feasting with the dead marks an incorporation into the next life. In Thorstein’s case, this involves rejoining his dead kin in Holy Mountain. Feasting marks both ends of the rite of passage, both separation rites and incorporation rites. Although the mound-dwellers of Gunnar and Thorstein remain in this world within their respective mound or mountain, they appear to have passed safely to their next existence and do not constitute threats to the living.

5 Conclusion Death is for most of us one of the most significant life history ‘crises’ and it is certainly the most mysterious (Metcalf and Huntington, 1992). The often enigmatic archaeological remains as well as the written sources left to us about Viking death – ranging from ibn Fadlan’s outsider perspective to the echoes of the Viking Age found in the Icelandic sagas – indicate that this was no different for the Vikings. This chapter considered Viking death beliefs and practices through the lens of van Gennep’s tripartite rites of passages. By viewing the ongoing rituals as tripartite, we saw the separate aims of departure, transition, and arrival, as well as how Viking rituals integrate the phases of van Gennep’s rites. This analysis showed that the Viking rites of passage incorporated the metaphor and practice of feasting regularly and prominently. The graveside feast was a key arena for reifying the social group first with and then without the dead.The feast in the afterlife marks the deceased’s entry into the next life, whether in a grave mound, in a holy mountain, or into Valhalla. The dead who failed to transition into the next world could threaten, help, or simply coexist with the living. There were many Viking conceptions of the afterlife and many corresponding ritual options to facilitate transitions into the afterlife.The rituals that seem so variable to us when we look at the archaeological material or the saga sources are probably variable exactly because Viking Age people had a great deal of options for appropriate rituals. The appropriateness of these rituals depended upon the identity of the dead, the aspirations of the living, and the desired destination for the dead. Key words: Vikings, feasts, mortuary rituals, Scandinavia, reciprocity

Acknowledgments I thank Wahlström & Widstrand and the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities (Kungliga Vitterhetsakademien) for permission to reproduce images from Lindqvist’s 1941 book on Gotlandic picture stones. I am grateful to my students in the Vikings and Early Medieval Europe classes at Baylor University, who discussed with me many of the concepts I developed in this chapter. Particularly, I thank my undergraduate research assistant, Taylor Strong, who spent many hours examining picture stones and talking about feasts. I also thank Candi K. Cann for shepherding this work and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions for improvement.

Notes 1 Scholars of the Vikings (see e.g. Roesdahl, 1998; Jones, 1984) generally identify the Rus (Rusiyyah) with Scandinavians engaged in raids, trade, and tribute extraction along the Russian rivers. For a cautionary voice about Rus ethnic identity, see Montgomery (2000), who also provides a translation of the section

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2

3

4 5

of ibn Fadlan’s text regarding the Rusiyyah. The Russian Primary Chronicle relates that the Rus were a sub-group of the larger ethnic group that it calls Varangians. The Chronicle tells that the Varangian Rus were invited in ad 860/862 to govern the Slavic tribes of Western Russia (Cross and ShrebowitzWetzor, 1953: p. 59). The Vikings had a writing system based on the runic alphabet known as futhark. The Vikings used runes for short texts such as commemorative inscriptions on rune stones and names or magical charms on objects. On the other hand, the Vikings retained their narrative stories orally. These oral stories were committed to writing mostly in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries after Christianization and after the introduction of the Latin alphabet and vellum manuscript technology. These stories, known as sagas, were written in the vernacular language of Old Norse/Old Icelandic. They are a rich resource for information about the Viking Age, but of course, they must be treated with caution. The funerary feast was a central arena for reinforcing – ritually and legally – the rights of inheritors.The Old Norse noun ‘funerary feast’ (erfi) is directly related to the words for ‘inheritance’ (afr) and ‘heir’ (arfi). The connection derives from the social tradition that the inheritor had the duty and honor of throwing the funerary feast – in fact, the verb for ‘to throw a funerary feast’ was erfa (see Grøvnik, 1982 for a detailed etymological argument for the connection between the institutions of inheritance and funerary feasting). Metcalf and Huntington (1991: p. 35) note that for both sacrifice and secondary burials ‘objects must be destroyed in this world in order that they may pass to the next.’ This is not an ethereal ghost. Rather, the original Old Norse draugr, here the poetic vættidraugr, is a corporeal revenant.

Further reading Montgomery, J. E. (2000) ‘Ibn Fadlān and the Rūsiyyah,’ Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, 3, pp. 1–25. Montgomery provides a study of ibn Fadlan’s text on the Rus as well as comprehensive notes on his translation. Parker Pearson, M. (2000) The Archaeology of Death and Burial. College Station:Texas A&M University Press. An excellent survey of mortuary variability in the archaeological and ethnographic record. Price, N. (2002) The Viking Way: Religion and War in Late Iron Age Scandinavia. Uppsala: Universitet, Uppsala. Price’s book contains a detailed analysis of Viking mortuary practices as seen both in the archaeological remains and in the Old Norse sources. The Sagas of the Icelanders (2001) Translations by various authors. London: Penguin. This selection of Norse sagas includes many sagas that are different from those referenced in this chapter. These sources contain a wealth of information about Viking conceptions of death. Van Gennep, A. (1908) The Rites of Passage. English Translation 1960 by M. B. Vizedom and G. L. Caffee. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Those who would like to delve deeper into the rites of passage can do no better than to start with van Gennep’s original work.

Bibliography Andreeff, A. (2007) ‘Gotlandic Picture Stones, Hybridity, and Material Culture,’ in: Cornell, P. and Fahlander, F. (eds). Encounters, Materialities, Confrontations: Archaeologies of Social Space and Interaction. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. Andreeff, A. (2012) ‘Archaeological Excavations of Picture Stone Sites,’ in: Karnell, M. H. (ed). Gotland’s Picture Stones: Bearers of an Enigmatic Legacy. Gotland: Gotländskt Arkiv. Andrén, A. (1993) ‘Doors to other worlds: Scandinavian death rituals in Gotlandic perspectives,’ Journal of European Archaeology, 1(1), pp. 33–56. Arrhenius, B. (1970) ‘Tür der Toten. Sach- und Wortzeugnisse zu einer frühmittelalterlichen Gräbersitte in Schweden,’ Frühmittelalterliche Studien, 4, pp. 384–394. Brøgger, A. W. and Schetelig, H. (1928) Osebergfundet, Bind II. Oslo, Universitetets Oldsaksamling. Byock, J. (trans). (2005) The Prose Edda: Norse Mythology. London: Penguin Books.

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Viking death Byock, J. (trans). (2009) Grettir’s Saga. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cook, R. (trans). (2001) Njal’s Saga. London: Penguin Books. Cross, S. H. and Shrebowitz-Wetzor, O. P. (trans). (1953) The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Tex. Cambridge: Medieval Academy of America. Davidson, H.R.E. (1943) The Road to Hell: A Study of the Conception of the Dead in Old Norse Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eriksen, M. H. (2013) ‘Doors to the Dead. The Power of Doorways and Thresholds in Viking Age Scandinavia,’ Archaeological Dialogues, 20, pp. 187–214. Gardela, L. (2013) ‘The Dangerous Dead? Rethinking Viking-Age Deviant Burials,’ in: Słupecki, L. and Simel, R. (eds). Conversions: Looking for Ideological Change in the Early Middle Ages.Vienna: Fassbaender. Gardela, L. (2016) ‘Worshipping the Dead:Viking Age Cemeteries as Cult Sites?’ in: Egler, M. (ed). Germanische Kultorte:Vergleichende, historische und rezeptionsgeschichtliche Zugänge. Munich: Herbert Utz Verlag. Grøvnik, O. (1982) The Words for ‘Heir,’ ‘Inheritance’ and ‘Funeral Feast’ in Early Germanic: An Etymological Study of ON arfr m, arfi m, erfa vb and the Corresponding Words in Other Old Germanic Dialects. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Herschend, F. (2000) ‘Ship Grave Hall Passage – The Oseberg Monument as Compound Meaning,’ in: Barnes, G. and Ross M. C. (eds). Old Norse Myths, Literature and Society. Proceedings of the 11th International Saga Conference 2–7 July 2000. University of Sydney. Hertz, R. (1960 [orig. 1907]) ‘A Contribution to the Collective Representation of Death,’ in: Death and the Right Hand. Glencoe: Free Press. Hollander, L. M. (1964) Heimskringla. Austin: University of Texas Press. Hollander, L. M. (2004) The Poetic Edda. Austin: University of Texas Press. Jones, G. (1984) A History of the Vikings. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leifsson, R. (2012) ‘Evolving Traditions: Horse Slaughter as Part of Viking Burial Customs in Iceland,’ in: Pluskowski, A. (ed). The Ritual Killing and Burial of Animals. European Perspectives, pp. 184–194. Lindqvist, S. (1941) Gotlands Bildsteine I. Stockholm: Wahlström and Widstrand. Ljungkvist, J. (2008) ‘Valsgärde ~ Development and Change of a Burial Ground Over 1300 Years,’ in: Norr, S. (ed). Valsgärde Studies.The Place and its People, Past and Present. Uppsala: Uppsala University. Lunde, P. and Stone, C. (2012) Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North. London: Penguin. Macleod, M. and Mees, B. (2006) Runic Amulets and Magic Objects. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer. Metcalf, P. and Huntington, R. (1991) Celebrations of Death:The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Montgomery, J. E. (2000) ‘Ibn Fadlān and the Rūsiyyah,’ Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, 3, pp. 1–25. Parker Pearson, M. (2000) The Archaeology of Death and Burial. College Station:Texas A&M University Press. Price, N. (2010) ‘Passing into Poetry:Viking-Age Mortuary Drama and the Origins of Norse Mythology,’ Medieval Archaeology, 54, pp. 123–156. Price, T. D., Peets, J., Allmäe, R., Maldre, L. and Oras, E. (2016) ‘Isotopic Provenancing of the Salme Ship Burials in Pre-Viking Age Estonia,’ Antiquity, 90, pp. 1022–1037. Quinn, J. (1997) ‘The Saga of the People of Eyri,’ in: Hreinsson,V. (ed). The Complete Sagas of the Icelanders, Vol. 5. Reykjavík: Leifur Eiríksson. Roesdahl, E. (1998) The Vikings. 2nd Edition. London: Penguin Books. Sikora, M. (2003) ‘Diversity in Viking Age Horse Burial: A Comparative Study of Norway, Iceland, Scotland and Ireland,’ The Journal of Irish Archaeology, pp. 87–109. Sørensen, A. C. (2001) Ladby- A Danish Ship-Grave from the Viking Age. Copenhagen:Viking Ship Museum/ National Museum of Denmark. Sveinsson, E. Ó. (ed). (1954) Brennu-Njáls Saga. Reykjavík: Íslenzk Fornrit 12: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag. Sveinsson, E. Ó. and Þórdarson, M. (eds). (1935) Eyrbyggja Saga. Reykjavík: Íslenzk Fornrit 4: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag. Turner,V. (1969) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine. Van Gennep, A. (1908) The Rites of Passage, English Translated 1960 by M. B. Vizedom and G. L. Caffee, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zori, D. and Byock, J. (2009) ‘Introduction,’ in: Byock, J. (ed). Grettir’s Saga. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zori, D., Byock, J., Erlendsson, E., Martin, S., Wake, T. and Edwards, K. J. (2013) ‘Feasting in Viking Age Iceland: Sustaining a Chiefly Political Economy in a Marginal Environment,’ Antiquity, 87, pp. 150–165.

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27 DEATH, RESURRECTION, AND THE WORLD TO COME Jewish views on death and the afterlife Nicholas R. Werse

1 Introduction A single chapter on the Jewish views of death and the afterlife cannot adequately survey the full breadth of this rich tradition.1 The present chapter surveys some of the key developments in five important eras of Jewish thought: Biblical Judaism, late Second Temple Judaism, Rabbinic Judaism, medieval Judaism, and modern Judaism.2 While each era develops the diversity of Jewish thought, it does so by responding to the questions and theological trajectories emerging from the received traditions of the past.Two features characterize the afterlife in Jewish thought: diversity and development. On the one hand, from the earliest descriptions of death and the afterlife in the Tanak, Judaism reflects diverse mortuary beliefs and practices coexisting in Jewish thought. On the other hand, this variety developed through each successive period of Jewish history as each new generation drew upon the diverse traditions of the past to engage their contemporary questions. As a result modern Jewish mortuary beliefs and practices exhibit considerable variety depending upon geography, sectarian commitments, and personal convictions.Thus in the midst of this diversity, key themes develop across the generations as central components to the Jewish understanding of the afterlife. These diverse Jewish conceptions of postmortem existence often reflect the core belief that in the afterlife, the deceased encounter divine justice which may or may not have fully manifest in the physical life.

2  Death and the afterlife in Biblical Judaism Although the Tanak (Hebrew Bible) preserves texts and traditions from the preexilic era (c. 1050–586 bce), scholars generally recognize that these scrolls underwent editing in the centuries following the end of the Jerusalem monarchy (e.g. Carr, 2011). As an edited compilation, the Tanak preserves various images and metaphors about death and the afterlife that defy easy systematization (on this diversity, see: Stavrakopoulou and Barton, 2010). These scriptures preserve the official literary memory of early Israelite and subsequent Jewish religion. This literary memory, however, does not always reflect the full diversity of beliefs and practices among Biblical Jews (Friedman and Overton, 2000). Archeological evidence suggests that preexilic Israelites ritually cared for the tombs of deceased ancestors.3 Excavations of tombs constructed out of caves reveal carved horizontal 342

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benches and a rear repository containing human bones and small personal belongings. These findings suggest that ancient Jewish families laid their dead on the benches for the duration of the decomposition process. After the completion of this process, family members gathered the remains and added them to the remains of previous generations in the rear repository (Osborne, 2011). This two-stage burial process suggests that families assumed extended responsibilities to care for the deceased. Some scholars conclude, therefore, that ancient Israelites observed regular care for the dead as part an ‘ancestor cult’ (e.g. Lewis, 1989: pp. 99–170; Toorn, 1996: pp. 206– 235; Hallote, 2001: pp. 54–68; cf. Albertz and Schmitt, 2012: pp. 438–469). The Biblical description of death as being ‘gathered unto the ancestors’ (e.g. Judg 2:10; 2 Kgs 22:20; 2 Chr 34:28; cf. Gen 47:30; Deut 31:16; 1 Kgs 2:10; 11:21) likely reflects this ancient use of family tombs (cf. Gen 23:1–20; 49:29–31). The Biblical evidence, however, preserves minimal awareness of ritual care for the dead (cf. Deut 26:14).The Tanak records mortuary practices associated with mourning such as tearing clothes (e.g. Gen 37:34; Lev 10:6), wearing sackcloth (e.g. Gen 37:34; 2 Sam 3:31), the cessation of grooming (e.g. Lev 10:6; 21:10; 2 Sam 14:2), and self-laceration (e.g. Lev 19:28; Deut 14:1; cf. Olyan, 2004). This observation raises the question of the degree to which the Tanak preserves customs that do not serve its theological purposes (Janowski, 2009). Although the Tanak may not preserve the full breadth of mortuary customs practiced in the Biblical period, it supplies the literary foundation for all subsequent Jewish faith and practice. The Tanak supplies the theological foundations for two central Jewish beliefs that develop in later periods concerning death and the afterlife: the immortality of the soul and the resurrection. The Jewish concept of the immortality of the soul finds its roots in the Tanak’s presentation of Sheol. The term ‘Sheol’ can apply to a literal ‘pit’ or ‘grave’ in which dead bodies decompose (e.g. Ezek 32:21, 27), or a postmortem ‘underworld.’ References to Sheol do not always clearly differentiate between the possible meanings of the term. Texts describing postmortem existence in Sheol often use language reminiscent of the physical decay of bodies in a literal grave. Isaiah 14:11, for example, suggests that the dead of Sheol have ‘maggots’ for their ‘bed’ and ‘worms’ for their ‘coverings.’ Such descriptions complicate the task of determining whether a given passage speaks of postmortem existence or physical bodily decay. The Tanak depicts a vague and fragmented representation of postmortem existence in Sheol. Descriptions of the ‘depths of Sheol’ (e.g. Deut 32:22; Prov 9:18) and contrasts with the heavens (e.g. Ps 139:8; Amos 9:2) suggest a subterranean realm.Various passages describe the journey to Sheol as a ‘descent’ (e.g. Isa 38:18; Ezek 26:20), and associate it with the ‘waters of chaos’ (e.g. 2 Sam 22:5; Ps 18:5[4]; cf. Job 26:5; 38:16–17). Biblical texts variously represent Sheol as a place of darkness (Ps 88:7[6], 13[12]) and silence (Pss 22:3[2]; 94:17), which reduces all humanity to a common state of weakness (Isa 14:9–11) and forgetfulness (Ps 88:13[12]). Descriptions of Sheol include images of locks and gates (Job 38:17; Isa 38:10), signaling that it is the final destination of the dead (e.g. Job 26:5; Isa 14:9) from which none return (e.g. Job 7:9; Jon 2:7[6]). The Tanak preserves considerable diversity when describing postmortem existence in Sheol. Whereas some passages suggest a postmortem consciousness (e.g. Isa 14:99–11), others assume that the dead lack activity or awareness (e.g. Ecc 9:10). Some passages envision Sheol as a punishment for the wicked (e.g. Prov 2:18–19; 5:5; Ps 9:18[17]) whereas others suggest Sheol supplies the same end for the wicked and the righteous alike (e.g. Ps 89:48–49; Ecc 9:10; 12:14). While there is no escape from Sheol, the prayers of the faithful occasionally credit God for delivering them from the ‘belly of Sheol’ (Jon 2:3[2]; cf. Ps 18:6[5]). This diversity demonstrates that from its very foundation, Judaism employed a variety of images and descriptions to talk about the afterlife in a way that defies systematization (see further: Johnston, 2002). The Tanak further supplies the foundation for the Jewish concept of an eschatological resurrection of the dead. The Hebrew Bible contains all of the theological building blocks for 343

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belief that God will physically raise the dead in a single eschatological event. Prophetic miracles include the raising of the dead (e.g. 1 Kgs 17:17–24; 2 Kgs 4:8–37; 13:20–21), and Jewish hopes for restoration from the exile (586–539 bce) employ metaphorical language of the corporate resurrection of the Jewish community (e.g. Isa 25:8; 29:19; Ezek 37:1–14; Hos 6:1–2; 13:14; for discussion: Collins, 2000: pp. 119, 120). The only clear Biblical description of an eschatological resurrection of the dead, however, occurs in Daniel 12:2.4 The dating of this passage to the second century bce (Albertz, 2001; Haag, 2001) suggests that it better reflects the theological developments of the post-Biblical period in Greco-Roman Palestine (Collins, 2000). Daniel 12:2 thus features in the following section on late Second Temple Judaism. Although the Hebrew Bible lacks the full range of mortuary customs and beliefs from the Biblical period, it supplies the foundation for the ensuing Jewish views of death and the afterlife. The diverse pictures of postmortem existence in the Tanak provide the building blocks for the belief in the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the dead. Neither of these concepts reaches its full theological maturity during the Biblical period. The questions and ambiguities of Biblical descriptions of these concepts blossom into the prolific literary explorations of the afterlife in the post-Biblical literature of the late Second Temple period.

3  Death and the afterlife in late Second Temple Judaism Judaism experiences a flurry of literary production in the post-Biblical period before the Roman destruction of the Second Jerusalem Temple (70 ce). The texts of this period testify to the development and diversity of Jewish thought in the Greco-Roman world. The first century ce Jewish historian Josephus reports (c. 90 ce) that the subject of the afterlife forms a significant doctrinal division between three prominent Jewish sects at the end of the Second Temple period.Whereas the Pharisees and Essenes believe in variations of postmortem existence marked by the divine distribution of rewards and punishments, the Sadducees deny the immortality of the soul and the resurrection (Ant. 18.14, 16, 18; cf. J.W. 2.154–165). Late Second Temple Jewish literature inherits the language surrounding death and the afterlife from the Tanak (e.g. Jub. 23:1; 36:1; 45:15; cf. Judg 2:10; 2 Kgs 22:20; 2 Chr 34:28). This collection of literature develops the descriptions of postmortem experience in Sheol and the resurrection. Despite the diversity in these developments, the Jewish views of the afterlife in the late Second Temple period grow to reflect the central conviction that the afterlife serves as a time for dispensing divine justice that may not fully manifest in corporeal existence. Post-Biblical descriptions of the afterlife develop Sheol from a vague notion of the underworld into an elaborate conception of postmortem judgment (Nickelsburg, 2000). HellenisticJewish authors regularly employ the Greek word Hádes for Sheol as found in the Septuagint. These descriptions of Sheol often echo language from the Tanak (e.g. Wis 2:1; 16:13; 17:13; Sir 17:27), yet continue to lack uniformity. Some texts simply use Sheol as a metaphor for death (e.g. 3 Macc 4:8; 5:42, 51; 6:31), whereas others elaborate on the description of postmortem existence. Second Baruch 23:5 and 4 Ezra 4:41 – two texts narrowly postdating the Second Temple period (Stone and Henze, 2013: pp. 1–18) – envision Sheol as a holding place for souls awaiting a final eschatological judgment, whereas 1 Enoch envisions Sheol as a place of postmortem punishment. One of the most extensive descriptions of Sheol from this period occurs in 1 Enoch. First Enoch develops in stages between the second century bce and the first century ce, resulting in internal diversity when describing the afterlife (Nickelsburg, 2001: pp. 25, 26).The text recounts Enoch’s journey to the top of a mountain from which he views heavenly mysteries and activities above the earth (1 En. 17–18; see discussion in Coblentz Bautch, 2003). Then Enoch 344

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travels to Sheol, described as a place of chaos. The text describes a complex realm of the dead where the wicked are separated into four groups for postmortem punishments reflective of their earthly sins (21–22). First Enoch 22:10–11 explains that these postmortem punishments fall on the wicked who did not receive just punishment in life (cf. 103:5–7; for further discussions, see: Coblentz Bautch, 2006). Elsewhere, 1 Enoch describes Sheol as a place of punishment for the wicked (56:8; 62:11–12; 99:11–16; 102:9–11; 103:5–8; cf. Jub.7:29; 22:22). First Enoch reflects developments in the Second Temple Jewish conception of postmortem judgment through its use of the designation Gehenna for the realm of the dead (1 En. 90:26; 27:1–5; 54:1–6; 56:1–3). As Raphael notes, many instances in 1 Enoch use Gehenna interchangeably with Sheol, though this is not the case in all Second Temple Jewish literature (1994: pp. 88, 89; e.g. 1 En. 51:1–3). The name Gehenna derives from the Aramaic designation for the Valley of Hinnom, located south of Jerusalem. Jeremiah 7:30–34 condemns Jerusalem’s inhabitants in the early sixth century bce for sacrificing their children with fire to the deity Molech (cf. 2 Kgs 23:10; Jer 19:5–6; 32:35). Although these practices cease in the sixth century bce, the Valley of Hinnom becomes associated with wickedness and the burning of human bodies in subsequent literary traditions (Watson, 1992). Gehenna thus comes to represent a cursed place of judgment (1 En. 27:1–5) associated with fiery torments (1 En. 54:1–6; 56:1–3; 90:24–27). Some passages suggest this fiery judgment awaits wicked angelic beings that rebel against God (e.g. 1 En. 10:11–14; 18:9–16), whereas others describe Gehenna as the final destination of wicked humans (1 En. 90:22–28; cf. 1 En. 48:8–10; 103:5–8). This concept of Gehenna adds new imagery to descriptions of postmortem existence: the fiery punishment of the wicked. Whereas earlier texts suggest that the wicked and the righteous receive a similar fate in Sheol (e.g. Ps 89:48–49; Ecc 9:10; 12:14), the development of Sheol (and Gehenna) into a place of postmortem punishment for the wicked raises a question concerning the fate of the righteous. Some late Second Temple literary traditions envision the righteous dead in a postmortem paradise where they enjoy blessings as reward for their earthly deeds (e.g. 1 En. 104:1–6). Psalm of Solomon 3:16, for example, contrasts the eternal judgment of sinners with the eternal life of the righteous in the presence of God (cf. Wis. 3:1–4; T. Ash. 6:5–6). Late Second Temple literary traditions reflect considerable diversity in describing this postmortem realm (e.g. ‘the garden of life’ in 1 En. 61:12 and ‘the garden of righteousness’ in 1 En. 77:3; cf. 90:23). The division of the fates of the wicked and the righteous in the afterlife results in the development of postmortem dualism in some segments of late Second Temple Judaism.This distinction between the postmortem fate of the righteous and the wicked coincides with the rising description of a postmortem judgment. Second Temple literature reflects the belief in an eschatological judgment of all people. The different fates of the wicked and the righteous suggests a growing concern with an individual postmortem judgment based upon one’s actions (e.g. 1 En. 1:1–9; cf. 1 En. 103:1–4; 2 En. 65:6). Thus several late Second Temple texts suggest that one’s actions in life are recorded for review in the afterlife (e.g. 1 En.104:7; cf. T. Ab. 13:9–10). Other descriptions of a personal postmortem judgment present it as a time in which all secrets will be uncovered (1 En. 98:6–7; cf. 2 En. 44:5). Late Second Temple Jewish literature also reflects the development of the concept of an eschatological resurrection of the dead. Scholars commonly conclude that the belief in the resurrection develops in the Hellenistic period in response to the problem of Jewish martyrdom under Seleucid occupation (c. 332–63 bce; Raphael, 1994: pp. 110, 111; Nickelsburg, 2006: pp. 19–215). Jewish martyrs may not experience the anticipated joys of the future earthly Kingdom of God on account of their deaths. The doctrine of the resurrection thus teaches that God will raise the dead so that they may justly receive their promised rewards in this future Kingdom. The belief in the resurrection thus encourages faithful Jewish heroes to face death bravely in 345

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martyrdom stories (e.g. 2 Macc 7:1–42; 14:46). One of the earliest articulations of the resurrection of the dead in Judaism occurs in Daniel 12:2, one of the final compositions in the Tanak. Daniel 12:2 speaks of a time in which those who ‘sleep in the dust’ will ‘awaken.’ This resurrection of the dead reflects a form of eschatological judgment as some of the dead awaken to ‘eternal life’ whereas others awaken to ‘eternal abhorrence.’This early description of the resurrection does not necessitate a universal resurrection of all people. Late Second Temple Jewish literature disagrees on who will experience resurrection. Second Maccabees suggests that God deals with Jews and gentiles differently (6:15). Whereas, the Jewish enemy Antiochus IV will not experience resurrection (7:14), the fallen idolatrous Jewish soldiers will rise from the dead (12:40–45). Other texts such as 4 Ezra 7:30–34 and 2 Bar. 50:1–4 alternatively suggest that all peoples will be raised from the dead in order to undergo judgment. Each of these articulations assumes the necessity of rejoining body and spirit at some future eschatological date. Two central Jewish beliefs concerning death and the afterlife thus develop in late Second Temple Jewish literature. On the one hand, the belief in the immortality of the soul and the underworld develops into elaborate descriptions of Sheol, Gehenna, and paradise wherein the dead receive punishments and rewards based upon their earthly actions. On the other hand, the belief in the resurrection develops into an eschatological paradigm in which God reanimates the dead in a future cosmic event. These two beliefs occasionally dialogue with one another (e.g. 1 En. 51:1–3), and at other times develop independently. Both of these beliefs affirm that God uses the afterlife experience to dispense justice according to one’s actions in life. Although both beliefs envision a postmortem judgment, the nature of this judgment differs from passage to passage. Resurrection passages envision the rejoining of body and spirit in a physical resurrection of the dead so that they can participate in an eschatological judgment. Descriptions of Sheol and Gehenna, however, often assume the reception of judgment in post-corporal form. Descriptions of judgment in Sheol and Gehenna may occasionally have eschatological overtones, but frequently assume some form of judgment immediately after death. This diversity experiences considerable development in the centuries following the Roman destruction of the Jerusalem temple (70 ce), when Judaism once again develops to operate in the absence of a central temple under the guidance of the Rabbis.

4  Death and the afterlife in Rabbinic thought In the centuries following the Roman destruction of the temple (70 ce), Rabbis emerge as the intellectual leaders who guide Judaism in the absence of the temple and priestly establishment. The Rabbinic tradition produces many texts over the course the next millennium. These texts testify to further development in the Jewish conceptions of death and the afterlife as Judaism grew to meet the new theological and social challenges of the diaspora. Rabbinic thought focuses on the interpretation of sacred texts, and thus reflects many of the theological traditions concerning death and the afterlife which grow out of the Tanak and Second Temple literature. The doctrine of the resurrection, for example, becomes central to Rabbinic thought, canonizing its place in nearly all of subsequent Judaism (e.g. m. Sanh. 10.1; b.Roš Haš. 17a; Raphael, 1994: pp. 156–160; Avery-Peck, 2000: pp. 247–249, 261–263; Gillman, 2000: pp. 113–131; Neusner, 2000).5 Rabbinic thought additionally strengthens the growing association of postmortem experience with divine justice. The idea that in death one finds justice for the deeds of life takes several forms in Rabbinic literature. Several Rabbinic discussions consider the ways in which one’s actions in life may lead to certain kinds of death. The wicked may experience more painful deaths, whereas the righteous may be fortunate enough to experience the peaceful release of the soul called the ‘kiss 346

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of death’ (b.Ber. 8a; b.Moʿed Qaṭ. 28a; b.B.Bat.17a). The spirit of the deceased, furthermore, may experience difficulties letting go of the body and transitioning into post-corporeal existence. Some texts suggest that the spirit remains with the body for three days after death until the decay process becomes visible (Gen. Rab. 100:7; Lev. Rab. 18:1; Midr. Ps. 11:7; cf. b.Šabb. 152b). Rav Ḥisda suggests the soul remains mourning for the body for seven days following death (b.Šabb.152a). Some of these texts complicate the process by distinguishing between the postmortem fate of the soul and the spirit. Thus Midr. Ps. 11:7 teaches that the ‘Angel of Death’ pulls the soul from the body and departs, at which point the spirit detaches from the body and sits on the nose of the deceased for three days. Once decay begins, the spirit will weep until a second Angelic figure (Dumah) takes the spirit to the ‘courtyard of the dead.’ Rabbinic thought similarly considers how the actions of the wicked impact their postmortem experience in Gehenna. Descriptions of Gehenna continue to use imagery of fire and darkness, but develop the punishments to more precisely reflect the sins of the wicked (e.g. b.Ber. 19a; 61a; b.Šabb. 33a; see further: Raphael, 1994: pp. 142–144). Midrash on Psalms, for example, divides Gehenna into seven regions reflecting different punishments for different kinds of sinners (11:7). In the same line of inquiry, Rabbinic tradition identifies good deeds that may keep one from Gehenna; such as giving to the poor and studying Torah (b.Ned. 40a; Pesiq. Rab. 50:1). Rabbinic descriptions of Gehenna reflect considerable diversity. Rabbis disagree, for example, over whether to locate Gehenna within the earth (e.g. b.ʿErub. 19a; b.Taʿan. 10a) or above the earth (e.g. b.Tamid. 32b). Similarly they disagree over whether or not rebellious Jews experience Gehenna along with wicked gentiles (cf. b.Roš Haš. 17a; b.ʿErub. 19a). One significant point of dispute is the duration of a soul’s punishment in Gehenna. Rabbis Shimon and Elazar, for example, teach that the judgment of Gehenna lasts for only twelve months (b.Šabb. 33b). Texts such as 3 En. 44:1–6 even suggest that postmortem punishments serve a temporary purifying purpose (cf. b.Qidd. 40b). The House of Hillel reportedly taught that most sinners descend to Gehenna for twelve months of judgment, after which their bodies and souls are destroyed.6 More egregious sinners, however, experience the torments of Gehenna for generations.The text says that Gehenna itself will wear out before completing the punishment of heretics, apostates, deniers of Torah, and deniers of the resurrection (b.Roš Haš. 17a; cf. t.Sanh. 13:3; b.B.Mes ̣. 58b). These Rabbinic texts additionally expound upon the afterlife rewards of the righteous. Rabbinic literature develops two central concepts for discussing the afterlife realm of the righteous: the ‘Garden of Eden’ (Gan Eden) and the ‘world to come’ (Olam Ha-Ba). Rabbinic literature often draws upon imagery from the Biblical Garden of Eden (Gen 2:4–25) in order to describe a postmortem paradise in which the righteous receive divinely decreed rewards (m.P.Abot 5:20; b.Ḥag 15a). Such descriptions include lush vegetation, fertile land, (e.g. b.ʿErub. 19a; b.Ḥag 14b), and flowing streams (b.Tamid 32b). Some texts describe this postmortem Garden of Eden as a terrestrial paradise for the righteous (e.g. b.ʿErub. 19a; b.Tamid 32b), whereas others assume a heavenly realm. Just as Rabbinic thought explores the ways various sins echo into one’s experience in Gehenna, so does it suggest that good works receive rewards and joys in the Garden of Eden (b. Šabb. 119b; Pesiq.Rab.Kah. 30, 191b). The conceptions of the Garden of Eden and Gehenna develop together in a close binary relationship. Some passages teach that God created the Garden of Eden and Gehenna before the creation of the world (b.Ned.39b; b.Pesaḥ; 54a). The Mishnah teaches that every person receives one share in the Garden of Eden and one share in Gehenna.The righteous inherit their share in the Garden of Eden along with the unclaimed share of a wicked neighbor, just as the wicked inherit their share in Gehenna along with the unclaimed share of a righteous neighbor (m.P.Abot5:2; cf. b.Ḥag 15a). Midrash on Psalms even teaches that before entering the Garden

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of Eden, God shows the righteous what they escaped in Gehenna. Similarly before entering Gehenna, God shows the wicked what they forsook in the Garden of Eden (6:6; 31:6). Rabbinic thought also develops descriptions of the postmortem existence of the righteous using the language of the ‘world to come’ (see: Avery-Peck, 2000: pp. 249–253, 263–264). The phrase ‘world to come’ first appears in 1 En. 71:15. Rabbinic literature develops the world to come into a place where the righteous receive rewards for the good deeds of their lives, such as caring for the poor, visiting the sick, and studying Torah (m.P Avot 2:7, 16; 4:17; m.Peʾah 1:1; b.Šabb. 127a; b.Ber. 28b). Generally, all Jews have a share in the world to come, but several teachings list certain crimes warranting exclusion, such as denying the resurrection (m.Sanh. 10:1), publically humiliating another (b.B.Mes ̣ 59a), desecrating holy days and sacred objects, or false teachings (m.P.Avot 3:11; cf. m.Sanh. 10:2). The world to come generally contrasts with corporeal existence in the present world. Rav teaches that the world to come lacks many of the physical features of the present world, such as eating, drinking, procreation, and interpersonal vices. Rather, the righteous enjoy the divine presence in the world to come (b.Ber. 17a; cf. m.Sanh. 10:1). Midrash Tanḥuma teaches that humanity cannot comprehend the joys of the world to come (Vayikra 8).Yet descriptions of the world to come often employ imagery of lush vegetation and agricultural abundance reminiscent of the Garden of Eden (e.g. b.Šabb.30b). A famous account of the sages teaches that a single grape in the world to come could fill a cart and produce thirty jars of wine (b.Ketub. 111b). Rabbinic texts do not always specify if the righteous enter the world to come immediately after death or in a future eschatological age. Mishnah Sanhedrin 10:1 teaches that the world to come follows the resurrection of the dead. Thus the world to come is only an eschatological reality yet to be realized by any of the deceased. Other passages, however, suggest that the world to come is a postmortem realm into which righteous souls immediately enter after death (e.g. Midr. Tanḥ.Vayikra 8). Each of these ways of talking about postmortem existence – Gehenna, the Garden of Eden, and the world to come – assume that the afterlife dispenses punishments and rewards based upon the actions of one’s physical life. As with late Second Temple literature, therefore, several Rabbinic teachings indicate that an individual’s actions are recorded for review in the afterlife. One tradition holds that two angels accompany each person through life to record every action (b.Taʿan. 11a). Even the smallest details of life face review (b.Ḥag. 5b). Some texts teach that the deceased experience a review of their entire lives immediately following death so as to justify the postmortem judgment (b.Taʿan. 11a).This belief coheres with the teaching of Rabbi Yaakov that ‘a single hour in repentance and good deeds in this world is worth more than lifetimes in the world to come’ (m.P. Avot 4:16). Bartenura explains that the world to come is only for receiving the rewards of actions performed in this world. Thus repentance and good deeds have eternal significance only when performed in this life (Bartenura on P.Avot 5:1).

5  Middle Ages developments Medieval Jewish literature continues many of the rabbinic trajectories of expanding the descriptions of postmortem existence in ways that Raphael compares with Dante’s Divine Comedy (1994: p. 164, cf. pp. 173–206). Medieval Jewry experiences the development of two significant streams of tradition: Jewish Philosophy and Jewish Mysticism (Kabbalah). Medieval Jewish Philosophy develops a distinctive literary genre that expands Jewish thought beyond religious themes to include secular subjects such as mathematics, medicine, science, and metaphysics. Medieval Jewish Philosophy includes some of the most prominent Jewish thinkers of the Middle

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Ages, including Abraham ibn Ezra, Gersonides, and Moses Maimonides (for further introduction, see: Guttmann, 1964; Sirat, 1985; Leaman, 2003). Moses Maimonides (c. 1135–1204) continues to be one of the most influential Jewish Philosophers on the subject of death and the afterlife (on his influence, see: Solomon, 1999: pp. 51–53; Rabinowitz et al., 2007: pp. 384, 385). A physician by trade, Maimonides is most known for his philosophical treatises exploring ideas from Greek Philosophy and Jewish thought (Davidson, 2005; Halbertal, 2014). In his Commentary on Mishnah, Sanhedrin 10 (c. 1165), he examines the many variances of opinion and conflicting theological traditions concerning the afterlife in Rabbinic thought. Maimonides critiques these various Jewish positions for assuming the material nature of postmortem existence. Previous Rabbinic positions commonly describe the joys of paradise as physical joys one would experience in the body. Maimonides argues, however, that since the body dies, one could not expect physical experiences as part of the afterlife. Maimonides differs from much of previous Jewish thought by firmly distinguishing between the body and the soul in a way reflective of his Aristotelian leanings (Guttmann, 1964: pp. 152–182; Frank, 2003). He argues that the experiences of postmortem existence apart from the body must be distinguished from the experiences of physical existence in the body.The afterlife, being a purely spiritual existence, therefore, must be conceived of in terms of spiritual experience. The living can only consider post-corporeal existence by spiritual reflection through the contemplation of God. According to Maimonides, true spiritual blessing derives from the knowledge of God and the experience of the divine presence. Thus one who seeks the knowledge of God in life prepares for the afterlife. For Maimonides, the righteous enter the world to come immediately after their release of the physical body through death. Some Jewish teachers of his day applied Maimonides’ notion of the afterlife as a purely spiritual existence to the resurrection. The doctrine of the resurrection traditionally affirms the reunification of body and soul.7 The central place of the resurrection in Jewish thought led to significant controversy over the use of Maimonides’ theological interpretations (see: Guttmann, 1964: pp. 183–208; Ben-Sasson, Jospe and Schwartz, 2007: pp. 371–381). Maimonides responds to this use of his writings by reaffirming his belief in a physical resurrection of the dead. He argues that it was improper to apply his philosophical inquiries into the afterlife to the resurrection since the resurrection requires divine intervention that extends beyond the confines of philosophical inquiry. Maimonides argues that the deceased immediately enter the world to come in the spiritual existence of the afterlife. These deceased will experience a bodily resurrection in which they return to corporeal existence in order to participate in the Messianic age. Maimonides suggests that this physical resurrected existence is only temporary. According to Maimonides, the resurrected dead enjoy long lives and the blessings of the Messianic kingdom, yet will again die and return to the world to come in a purely spiritual existence (Raphael, 1994: pp. 255–258; Gillman, 2000: pp. 143–172). The second stream of Jewish tradition that develops in the Middle Ages is Jewish Mysticism, known as Kabbalah (Scholem, 1987; Scholem, Garb and Idel, 2007). Kabbalah crystalizes in the thirteenth-century ce production of one of the movement’s central texts: the Sefer Ha-Zohar (Scholem, 1995: pp. 156–204). The Zohar, along with the broader tradition of Kabbalah, develops many themes with roots in earlier periods of Jewish thought (Scholem, 1995: pp. 40–79). The Zohar thus develops the themes of Gehenna, the Garden of Eden, and the protocol guiding a soul’s entrance into the afterlife. The Zohar suggests that at the moment of death, the dying may experience a vision of their life review, the divine glory, the Angel of Death, or deceased loved ones welcoming them into the afterlife (III, 53a, 88a; I, 98a, 219a, 221a; see discussion in: Solomon, 1999: pp. 101–109).

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The Kabbalistic threefold division of the soul forms the foundation of the afterlife experience in the Zohar. Each of the three parts of the soul has a different afterlife experience. The first level of the soul, the nefesh, supplies the basic animating force of the body. The nefesh stays with the body after death until the completion of the decomposition process, after which it becomes a wandering spirit. The second level of the soul, the ruah, supplies the personal cognition that directs the nefesh and the body in life. The ruah assumes responsibility for the good and evil committed in life and thus travels to Gehenna for no more than twelve months where it is purified of its wickedness before entering the Garden of Eden. The third level of the soul, the neshamah, reflects a spiritual awareness developed through the study of Torah. The neshamah provides humanity’s connection to God and embodies the good that grows from devotion to Torah. This part of the soul thus travels to the heavenly Garden of Eden immediately following death (Zohar II,141a-b; for a Kabbalistic five-fold division of the soul, see: Raphael, 1994: pp. 280, 281, 364–371). Medieval Kabbalists also develop the notion of reincarnation in Judaism (Raphael, 1994: pp. 314–317; Eylon, 2003: pp. 89–124; cf. Solomon, 1999: pp. 220–241).The exact origins of this doctrine remain uncertain to many scholars (Raphael, 1994: p. 315). Kabbalah texts speak of a gilgul or ‘wheel/revolution’ in which a person may die and subsequently return to the life cycle from the beginning (Scholem, 1991: p. 203). Prominent scholar of Medieval Kabbalah Gershom Scholem argues that this belief in reincarnation initially functions as an extension of divine mercy on select groups of the wicked. Instead of experiencing punishment in Gehenna, some were permitted to return to life to fulfill previously neglected divine commands. Over time, Scholem argues that this ‘revolution of souls’ was applied to wider groups of people requiring another chance at life (1991: pp. 208–212). Although Maimonides’ spiritualization of postmortem existence and Kabbalists’ introduction of reincarnation reflect considerable innovation in Jewish thought, each of these ideas continues to develop the association between postmortem existence and the distribution of divine justice. Each of these medieval developments build upon, and respond to, the received Jewish traditions concerning the afterlife. This process of reflection and development continues for centuries, eventually forming the foundation for the mosaic of tradition found in modern Jewish faith and practice.

6  A mosaic of tradition: modern Jewish beliefs and practice Modern Jewish mortuary practices reflect a mosaic of tradition that has grown over nearly three millennia. This mosaic of tradition results in considerable diversity depending upon one’s geographic location, sectarian commitments, and personal convictions. Modern Jewish beliefs range from denials of an afterlife existence to elaborate images of postmortem rewards and punishments. Across this diversity, however, Jewish practice reflects considerable concern for the care of the dying as they transition from this life into postmortem existence. Many modern Jewish authors express an explicit interest in caring not simply for the physical comforts of the dying, but also for the spiritual and psychological well-being of those facing the limits of their mortality (Raphael, 1994: pp. 403–412; Solomon, 1999: pp. 66–91). The practice of a deathbed confessional (viddui), for example, attends to the spiritual and psychological well-being of the dying. This practice first emerges in the thirteenth century ce, though Solomon notes that it fell out of use over the last century (1999: p. 67).The practice of a deathbed confessional builds on the acknowledgment in Prov 28:13 ‘that those who confess . . . will obtain mercy.’ Solomon presents the deathbed confessional as a Jewish practice that can aid the dying in exploring and addressing unresolved emotions in relation to God, friends, family, 350

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and the self (1999: p. 68). Solomon similarly advocates adopting the mystical tradition of a postmortem life review into the dying process by guiding the departing through a process of sharing life stories as a way to prepare for death. For Solomon, sharing life stories empowers the dying to pass on their personal legacy to family and helps resolve lingering emotional concerns from past experiences (1999: pp. 110–114; cf. Raphael, 1994: pp. 408–410). After death, many Jewish families employ a burial society (Ḥevra Kaddisha) to care for the body. Burial societies first developed in fourteenth-century ce Europe in part to care for the numerous burials during the Black Plague. The use of formal burial societies diminished in North American practice, though Raphael notes that it is experiencing renewed interest (1994: p. 417). These societies assume responsibility for the care of the body between death and burial. They assign a guard to stay with the body and recite prayers and Psalms until the burial in a practice called shmira. The practice of shmira emerges from the practical concern to ward off rodents and insects from the body before the funeral. The recitation of prayers and Psalms grew out of the Rabbinic tradition that a soul may experience disorientation immediately following its separation from the body. It may linger near the body, longing to return to corporeal existence. The recitation of prayers and Psalms endeavors to help the soul reorient to post-corporeal existence so that it can proceed into the afterlife (Raphael, 1994: pp. 418, 419; Solomon, 1999: p. 125). Burial societies also perform the taharah, or the ritual washing of the body in preparation for burial. They clothe the body in white garments (tachrichim) and a final shroud. These clothes traditionally lack pockets, signaling that the departed takes no material possessions into the afterlife. The burial society then lays the body in a simple coffin made without nails, screws, or other fasteners before the funeral (Raphael, 1994: pp. 415–417; Solomon, 1999: pp. 130, 131; Rabinowitz and Goldberg, 2007). The funeral usually features a remembrance of the departed. The mourners participate in the recitation of prayers and Psalms during the service as well as the recitation of the Mourner’s Kaddish. The Mourner’s Kaddish is traditionally recited while standing and facing Jerusalem (Raphael, 1994: pp. 419–427; Solomon: 1999: pp. 131–133). Following the funeral, mourners may gather at a separate location for a post-funeral meal called the seudat habra’ah (Feldman, 1977: pp. 83, 84; Levine, 1994: pp. 45–59). Family members may participate in a variety of mourning practices before or after the funeral. Some families, for example, engage in the ritualistic tearing of clothes called the keriah before a funeral. In some traditions this involves tearing an outer garment, whereas others tear or cut a symbolic black cloth or ribbon. Following the funeral, family members traditionally observe a formal period of mourning (usually one week) called the shivah in which they suspend normal daily routines. Practices vary from tradition to tradition, but during this week the family may light a candle, hold family prayers, and cover household mirrors. Mourners additionally refrain from regular grooming practices (Feldman, 1977: pp. 184–186). During this time members of the community visit the bereaved to offer emotional support (Levine, 1994: pp. 61–85; Solomon, 1999: pp. 133–135). Following this initial period of mourning, the family engages in an extended thirty-day period of mourning (shloshim) during which they gradually reintegrate into the daily life of the community (Feldman, 1977: pp. 87, 88). The family continues regularly reciting the Kaddish for eleven months. This length of time emerges from the tradition that a soul may endure up to twelve months of purification in Gehenna. To recite the Kaddish for the full twelve months, however, would suggest that the deceased required the full duration of purification.To avoid such implications, the recitation of the Kaddish traditionally continues for only eleven months. The recitation of the Kaddish for eleven months thus grows from the tradition that the deceased experiences divine justice immediately following death, which may require some form of purification. The bereaved may continue a variety of practices after the first year to remember the departed. Family members traditionally hold a memorial service (yizkor) on 351

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the one-year anniversary of the deceased’s death. Families may continue to mark the anniversary of death through lighting memorial candles and reciting prayers (Raphael, 1994: pp. 427–452; Solomon, 1999: pp. 201–204).

Conclusion Each of these contemporary practices develops as the culmination of thousands of years of rereading and interpreting earlier traditions in Judaism. From its earliest scriptures, Judaism has never had a single systematic picture of death and the afterlife. Rather, throughout its history Judaism has employed various images, metaphors, and ways of speaking about the afterlife. Jewish teachers across the ages disagree on many interpretive aspects of these various images. These images have developed through each successive era of Jewish history as each new generation returns to the traditions of the past with new questions from the present. Critical scholarship traces a number of religious innovations throughout Jewish history. For many practicing Jews, however, these innovations are not so much departures from the ways of the past as they are interpretations that allow them to remain faithful to the inherited principles and convictions of Judaism. The modern use of burial societies has many differences from the burial practices of the Biblical period, yet both customs embody the principle of honoring the dead by assuming responsibilities that continue years after the loss of a loved one. Across this mosaic of tradition, the Jewish views of death and the afterlife frequently reflect the conviction that the afterlife serves to dispense divine justice. Whether one speaks of the resurrection, or postmortem existence in Sheol, the Garden of Eden, or the world to come, the afterlife serves as a time for distributing the rewards and punishments merited by one’s physical life. Key words: Judaism, death, afterlife, Sheol, Gehenna, paradise, Garden of Eden, resurrection, soul, Rabbinic Judaism, Kabbalah, Jewish Philosophy, Biblical Judaism, Second Temple Judaism

Notes 1 Scholarship often associates the beginnings of Judaism with the reestablishment of temple operations in Jerusalem during the Persian Period (539–332 bce; e.g. Ahlström, 1993: pp. 835–906; cf. Davies, 2011). Jewish thought in the Second Temple period (c. 515 bce–70 ce), of course, develops earlier religious traditions from the preexilic era (c. 1050–586 bce). Thus an investigation of the Jewish views on death and the afterlife must account for 2,500–3,000 years of historical development. 2 Primary source abbreviations follow the conventions of the Society of Biblical Literature in Collins, Buller and Kutsko, 2014. Biblical verse references follow the Hebrew versification system, with English versification appearing in brackets when necessary (e.g. Hos 2:23–25 [21–23]). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are the work of the author. 3 For a comparison of Israelite and ancient Near Eastern mortuary practices, see: Hallote (2001: pp. 1–122). On burial practices in the Second Temple period (c. 539 bce–70 ce), see: Hachlili (2005). 4 Scholarship debates whether Isa 26:19 assumes a personal resurrection of the dead as part of the postmortem existence (Schmitz, 2003), or a corporate resurrection of the national identity (Day, 1978). 5 For further assessment of the Rabbinic views of death and the afterlife, see Kraemer (2000). 6 Other Rabbinic traditions record twelve months as the length of time for physical postmortem decomposition (e.g. b.Šabb 152b). The destruction of body and soul in b.Roš Haš. 17a suggests that the souls of the wicked suffer in Gehenna for the duration of the decomposition process. 7 The Jewish doctrine of the resurrection teaches that at a future eschatological time, God will reunite the body and the soul of the deceased thereby restoring the deceased to the same physical corporeal existence experienced during life. B.Sanh. 91a-b suggests that this physical reunification of the body and spirit is necessary in order to pass judgment on the sins committed by the united body and spirit during life.

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Further reading Avery-Peck, A. J. and Neusner, J. (eds). (2000) Death, Life-After-Death, Resurrection and the World-to-Come in the Judaisms of Antiquity,Vol. 4 of: Judaism in Late Antiquity. Leiden: Brill (HdO, 49). A helpful edited collection on the Jewish views of death and the afterlife from the Biblical period to Rabbinic Judaism. Hallote, R. S. (2001) Death, Burial, and Afterlife in the Biblical World: How the Israelites and their Neighbors Treated the Dead. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. Hallote supplies a useful comparison of death and the afterlife in Biblical Israel with its ancient Near Eastern context. Raphael, S. P. (1994) Jewish Views of the Afterlife. Northvale, NJ: J. Aronson. Raphael provides one of the most extensive surveys of death and the afterlife in Jewish thought beginning with the Tanak and tracing developments through to modern Jewish practice. Riemer, J. (ed). (2002) Jewish Insights on Death and Mourning. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Riemer’s edited collection presents a topically arranged mixture of modern essays and historical sources on death and the afterlife in Judaism.

Bibliography Ahlström, G. W. (1993) The History of Ancient Palestine. Edited by D.V. Edelman. Minneapolis: Fortress. Albertz, R. (2001) ‘The Social Setting of the Aramaic and Hebrew Book of Daniel,’ in: Collins, J. J. and Flint, P. W. (eds). The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception. Leiden: Brill (VTSup, 83), pp. 171–204. Albertz, R. and Schmitt, R. (2012) Family and Household Religion in Ancient Israel and Levant. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. Avery-Peck, A. J. (2000) ‘Death and Afterlife in the Early Rabbinic Sources:The Mishnah,Tosefta, and Early Midrash Compilations,’ in: Avery-Peck, A. J. and Neusner, J. (eds). Death, Life-After-Death, Resurrection and the World-to-Come in the Judaisms of Antiquity,Vol. 4 of: Judaism in Late Antiquity. Leiden: Brill (HdO, 49), pp. 243–266. Ben-Sasson, H. H., Jospe, R. and Schwartz, D. (2007) ‘Maimonidean Controversy,’ Encyclopaedia Judaica. 2nd Ed. Edited by M. Berenbaum and F. Skolnik. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA. Carr, D. M. (2011) The Formation of the Hebrew Bible: A New Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press. Coblentz Bautch, K. (2003) A Study of the Geography of 1 Enoch 17–19: ‘No One Has Seen What I Have Seen’. Leiden: Brill (JSJSup, 81). Coblentz Bautch, K. (2006) ‘Situating the Afterlife,’ in: DeConick, A. D. (ed). Paradise Now: Essays on Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism. Leiden: Brill (SymS, 11), pp. 249–264. Collins, B. J., Buller, B. and Kutsko, J. F. (eds). (2014) The SBL Handbook of Style: For Biblical Studies and Related Disciplines. 2nd ed. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature. Collins, J. J. (2000) ‘The Afterlife in Apocalyptic Literature,’ in: Avery-Peck, A. J. and Neusner, J. (eds). Death, Life-After-Death, Resurrection and the World-to-Come in the Judaisms of Antiquity, Vol. 4 of: Judaism in Late Antiquity. Leiden: Brill (HdO, 49), pp. 119–139. Davidson, H. A. (2005) Moses Maimonides:The Man and his Works. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Davies, P. R. (2011) On the Origins of Judaism. London: Equinox (Bible World). Day, J. (1978) ‘tal ôrot in Isaiah 26:19,’ Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, 90, pp. 265–269. Eylon, D. R. (2003) Reincarnation in Jewish Mysticism and Gnosticism. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen (Jewish Studies, 25). Feldman, E. (1977) Biblical and Post-Biblical Defilement and Mourning: Law as Theology. New York: Yeshiva University Press (Library of Jewish Law and Ethics). Frank, D. H. (2003) ‘Maimonides and Medieval Jewish Aristotelianism,’ in: Frank, D. H. and Leaman, O. (eds). The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Jewish Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy), pp. 136–156. Friedman, R. E. and Overton, S. D. (2000) ‘Death and Afterlife: The Biblical Silence,’ in: Avery-Peck, A. J. and Neusner, J. (eds). Death, Life-After-Death, Resurrection and the World-to-Come in the Judaisms of Antiquity,Vol. 4 of: Judaism in Late Antiquity. Leiden: Brill (HdO, 49), pp. 35–59.

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Nicholas R. Werse Gillman, N. (2000) The Death of Death: Resurrection and Immortality in Jewish Thought. First Quality Paperback Ed. Woodstock,VT: Jewish Lights. Guttmann, J. (1964) Philosophies of Judaism:The History of Jewish Philosophy from Biblical Times to Franz Rosenzweig. Translated by D. W. Silverman. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Haag, E. (2001) ‘Daniel 12 und die Auferstehung der Toten,’ in: Collins, J. J. and Flint, P. W. (eds). The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception. Leiden: Brill (VTSup, 83), pp. 132–148. Hachlili, R. (2005) Jewish Funerary Customs, Practices, and Rites in the Second Temple Period. Leiden: Brill (JSJSup, 94). Halbertal, M. (2014) Maimonides: Life and Thought. Translated by J. A. Linsider. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hallote, R. S. (2001) Death, Burial, and Afterlife in the Biblical World: How the Israelites and their Neighbors Treated the Dead. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. Janowski, B. (2009) ‘Der Gott Israels und die Toten: Eine religions- und theologiegeschichtliche Skizze,’ in: Hartenstein, F. and Rösel, M. (eds). JHWH und die Götter: Symposium zum 80. Geburtstag von Klaus Koch. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, pp. 99–138. Johnston, P. (2002) Shades of Sheol: Death and Afterlife in the Old Testament. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity. Kraemer, D. C. (2000) The Meanings of Death in Rabbinic Judaism. London: Routledge. Leaman, O. (2003) ‘Introduction to the Study of Medieval Jewish Philosophy,’ in: Frank, D. H. and Leaman, O. (eds). The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Jewish Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy), pp. 3–15. Levine, A. (1994) To Comfort the Bereaved: A Guide for Mourners and Those Who Visit Them. Northvale, NJ: J. Aronson. Lewis, T. J. (1989) Cults of the Dead in Ancient Israel and Ugarit. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press (HSM, 39). Neusner, J. (2000) ‘Death and Afterlife in the Later Rabbinic Sources: The Two Talmuds and Associated Midrash-Compilations,’ in: Avery-Peck, A. J. and Neusner, J. (eds): Death, Life-After-Death, Resurrection and the World-to-Come in the Judaisms of Antiquity,Vol. 4 of: Judaism in Late Antiquity. Leiden: Brill (HdO, 49), pp. 267–291. Nickelsburg, G. W. E. (2000) ‘Judgment, Life-After-Death, and Resurrection in the Apocrypha and the Non-Apocalyptic Pseudepigrapha,’ in: Avery-Peck, A. J. and Neusner, J. (eds). Death, Life-After-Death, Resurrection and the World-to-Come in the Judaisms of Antiquity,Vol. 4 of: Judaism in Late Antiquity. Leiden: Brill (HdO, 49), pp. 141–162. Nickelsburg, G. W. E. (2001) 1 Enoch: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch (2 vol). Minneapolis, MN: Fortress (Hermeneia). Nickelsburg, G. W. E. (2006) Resurrection, Immortality, and Eternal Life in Intertestamental Judaism and Early Christianity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press (HTS, 56). Olyan, S. M. (2004) Biblical Mourning: Ritual and Social Dimensions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Osborne, J. F. (2011) ‘Secondary Mortuary Practice and the Bench Tomb: Structure and Practice in Iron Age Judah,’ Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 70, pp. 35–53. Rabinowitz, L. I. and Goldberg, S. A. (2007) ‘Ḥevra (Ḥavurah) Kaddishad,’ Encyclopaedia Judaica. 2nd Ed. Edited by M. Berenbaum and F. Skolnik. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA. Rabinowitz, L. I., et al. (2007) ‘Maimonides, Moses,’ Encyclopaedia Judaica. 2nd Ed. Edited by M. Berenbaum and F. Skolnik. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA. Raphael, S. P. (1994) Jewish Views of the Afterlife. Northvale, NJ: J. Aronson. Schmitz, P. C. (2003) ‘The Grammar of Resurrection in Isaiah 26:19a-c,’ Journal of Biblical Literature, 122, pp. 145–140. Scholem, G. (1987) Origins of the Kabbalah. Edited by R. J. Z. Werblowsky. Translated by A. Arkush. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society. Scholem, G. (1991) On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah. 1st American Ed. Edited by J. Chipman. Translated by J. Neugroschel. New York: Schocken Books. Scholem, G. (1995) Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. 3rd Revised. New York: Schocken Books. Scholem, G., Garb, J. and Idel, M. (2007) ‘Kabbalah,’ Encyclopaedia Judaica. 2nd Edition. Edited by M. Berenbaum and F. Skolnik. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA. Sirat, C. (1985) A History of Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Solomon, L. D. (1999) The Jewish Book of Living and Dying. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.

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Death, resurrection, and the world to come Stavrakopoulou, F. and Barton, J. (2010) ‘Introduction: Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah,’ in: Stavrakopoulou, F. and Barton, J. (eds). Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah. London:T&T Clark, pp. 1–8. Stone, M. E. and Henze, M. (2013) 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch: Translations, Introductions, and Notes. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Toorn, K. van der (1996) Family Religion in Babylonia, Syria, and Israel: Continuity and Changes in the Forms of Religious Life. Leiden: Brill (Studies in the History and Culture of the Ancient Near East, 7). Watson, D. F. (1992) ‘Gehenna,’ Anchor Bible Dictionary. Edited by D. N. Freedman. New York: Doubleday.

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28 THE AFTERLIFE AND DEATH An Islamic perspective David Oualaalou

1 Introduction In Islamic teachings, belief about the afterlife is essential for strengthening one’s adherence and completion of the faith. Muslims believe that when one dies he or she has an unremitting existence of sorts while in the grave, thus entering into Al-Barzagh (Transitional World). The Holy Qur’an (the religious text of Islam) and the Sunna (the body of traditional social and legal practice of the Islamic community) emphasize that after death, Allah (God) will reunite the soul with the body and humans will gather on the judgment day to find out who will be granted paradise including the Firdaws (the highest part of paradise) and who will be thrown into the hellfire (Smith and Haddad, 1981: p. 87).Within this context, the physical existence of a Muslim on earth constitutes a set of trials and tests by means of which his or her final destiny is determined. Thus, Muslims perceive death not only as the return of the soul to its creator, Allah, but also the passage to the hereafter. Consequently, the inevitability of death and the afterlife is never far from a Muslim’s consciousness. This notion reminds Muslims to place their existence, life, deeds, and interactions with others in perspective as they go through life in preparation for the hereafter. For this reason, the concept of death and the afterlife is frequently emphasized in the Holy Qur’an.

2  Muslims’ notion of death There are different accounts of what happens to the body upon death. From the time of death to the Day of Judgment, Muslims believe the spirit remains in a state of ‘dreamless sleep,’ with the exception of possible visions of eternity (San Filippo, 2006). Muslims also believe that the earthly lifespan of every individual is decided by Allah. In Islam it is ‘an article of faith that there is a Day of Resurrection and of Judgment on which the living and the dead shall answer for their thoughts and actions’ (Kassis, 1997: p. 56). I provide a detailed narrative, from an Islamic perspective, about the transition a Muslim encounters when he or she dies and traverses into the hereafter. I describe the different experiences of the grave the deceased endures at different phases, as each phase holds a special meaning and interpretation. For instance, the Qur’an provides various death themes that contribute significantly to our understanding of and insights about the concept of death. Yet, the concept 356

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was never defined; rather, it has always been portrayed in connection with other notions like those of life, resurrection, and even creation. The Qur’an reads, Every human being is bound to taste death: but only on the Day of Resurrection will you be required in full [for whatever you have done] – whereupon he that shall be drawn away from the fire and brought into paradise will indeed have gained a triumph: for the life of this world is nothing but an enjoyment of self-delusion. Assad, 2003: p. 113 What this Qur’anic verse suggests is that when a Muslim dies, her or his physical existence does not separate from his/her soul. He or she, however, has to experience death. Islamic teaching holds that death is perceived as a journey through a separate dimension of existence. That existence starts at the grave where the deceased undergoes her or his first test that determines her or his fate in the afterlife where one’s existence could either be in paradise or in the hellfire. It is widely held in Islamic tradition that the grave represents not only the first stage where one’s faith is tested, but is also a setting that can serve as a punishment, a judgment, and a dreamless sleep. To an outsider who is not familiar with the Islamic tradition, these different images evoke confusion and do not adhere to a particular set of conformity. Yet, Muslims around the world understand that the deceased must, and will, go through all these phases in the grave to determine his or her postmortem fate. These different descriptions vis-à-vis the grave experiences (punishment, sleep, test) do not represent a diversity of thought within the Muslim world. Rather they contribute to a coherent belief in which the deceased, once tested, is believed to be bound for paradise or hell. Furthermore, for Muslims, caring for the corpse in various ways (for instance, through the ritual washing of the decedent) is mandatory, while also reflecting how much God values cleanliness. For a Muslim, the family of the deceased wants to ensure their loved one is clean and ready for their journey into the eternal life. Muslim scholars describe how one does not cease to exist when in sleep, nor does the individual cease to exist in death. Similarly, one comes back to life after waking up from his/her sleep, and thus it is believed that he or she will be awakened from death on the Day of Judgment. A similar argument can be made when, for instance, the Qur’an highlights that Allah takes one’s soul at the time of his or her death the same way he takes it during his/her sleep.Yet, the difference is that Allah restores the soul once one wakes up; however, Allah retains it upon his or her death (Halevi, 2011: p. 205). What is interesting in this respect is that the inter-world prevents the dead from going back to earth. There is a separation between the dead and the living not only in the material world, but also in time and space. Halevi (2011) writes, The Qur’anic al-barzakh probably formed an eschatological barrier preventing the dead sleepers from returning to earth. Such a conception implies that the dead are separated from the living in the dimensions of both space and time. One envisions an encounter between both parties only at the resurrection. p. 204 Within this context, Muslims perceive death as a stage in their existence that will eventually end on the physical level, but not on a spiritual one. For this reason, Islam teaches Muslims not to fear death, but rather to embrace and welcome it. The concerns about one’s fate in the afterlife, however, lie in whether one has lived a life free of moral corruption. It is within this context that the Qur’an provides answers to the mystery of death – and life for that matter – by encouraging Muslims to live a spiritual life through the observance of Islamic practices (prayers, fasting, 357

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charity. . .) in order to connect with Allah.The central question that Muslim scholars, such as the noted theologian Al-Ghazali, address thus becomes: Will having a human conscience lead to a spiritually rich and meaningful life? In his writings, al-Ghazali provided unique insights through his exegesis on a host of issues – including death – not only for Muslims, but readers, writ large, to have a better comprehension and closer affinity with the sacred text of the Qur’an. It is within this context (the question of the purpose of life and the meaning of death) that Islam seeks to remind Muslims that their existence is not based on accumulating materialistic wealth, but rather, furthering their understanding that the teaching of religion is part of human experience (Bensaid, 2015: p. 89). Equally important, Muslims draw wisdom and lessons from the Qur’an which presents different images and pictures of life and death. These images are meant for Muslims to reflect upon their existence and realize that life does not exist through an empty vacuum of time and space. Rather, it (life) has a purpose through which a Muslim’s fate in the afterlife is determined not only through his or her good deeds, but also by a merciful Allah (Smith and Haddad, 1981: p. 3). In Islamic culture, the notions of the afterlife and death become a central part of the Muslim’s life and existence. This notion is not only culturally accepted, but also religiously taught and embraced. In Islam, for instance, when one dies, people who knew the deceased person will repeat the religious saying, ‘We belong to Allah and to Allah we return.’ This saying offers a reminder to all adherents that Allah knows each one’s destiny. This saying also serves as an affirmation of what is to come after we die. Because of this, the notion of death is seen as part of one’s faith in Allah. While the family of the deceased believes firmly that by enacting good deeds (readings from the Qur’an, serving funeral repast, etc.) on behalf of their loved one, the family refrains from acts that they believe might negatively impact the deceased’s fate in the afterlife, such as placing flowers at the gravesite. Currently, there is a debate within the Muslim world as to whether the grave should even be marked. While Muslim fundamentalists refuse such undertakings, young Muslims of today are challenging this tradition and defying this early practice of non-marking, especially when it comes to the grave of their parents and loved ones. While the Qur’an indicates that every soul will go through the agony of death while transitioning to the afterlife, the debate about death in general is still limited. The idea that death is the cessation of life is rare in the Muslim world. Rather, a majority of Muslims believe that life is preparatory for the hereafter. One argues that in the Islamic tradition, attending funerals, for instance, is considered meritorious even if one does not know the deceased because it reminds the visitor(s) that we all shall experience death, and that life is nothing but a transition to the hereafter. Similarly, the visitation of the gravesite reinforces this notion of remembrance (Waugh, 1999: p. 17). Muslim teaching also reaffirms the belief that when death comes, the family should not question the reason for the death or why the family has lost its loved one (Sajid, 2009). Rather, they should conclude that the death of their loved one is the termination of his/her journey on earth. The family is generally expected to embrace death since it is divinely willed by Allah.

3  Islamic perspectives regarding graves By studying different descriptions of what the grave means in the Muslim tradition vis-à-vis the hereafter, we acquire a better understanding of the significance that Muslims place on the afterlife and burial process. According to Islamic tradition, when a Muslim dies he or she is always buried, never cremated. The grave is the first phase of the afterlife, and it is believed that the fate of the deceased is determined on that individual’s first night in the grave. Most scholars agree that following death, the deceased lives in an imaginal realm known to Muslims as the 358

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‘transitional world’ (some sacred texts refer to it as the inter-world in which souls take on shapes that symbolize their past deeds and misdeeds). During this stage, the deceased’s good deeds they performed in their lifetime manifest themselves in comparable forms. al-Ghazali compares this phase of the deceased’s journey to a dreamless state. Following his or her death, the deceased remains in the grave until Allah decides on the Day of Judgment. During this phase (of remaining in the grave), the departed falls into an unconscious state in which the spirit of the dead can hear the cries and prayers of her or his loved ones, but the deceased is unable to respond to them (Moreman, 2010: p. 86). Similarly, scholars compare the state of transitioning into the hereafter to that of waking up from sleep and not remembering the dreams we had. One concludes the close similarities between the state of sleep and the transitional world. The latter, itself, is a kind of waking up in relation to this world. Hence some claim that the experiences of the interworld are more real and intense than those of the present life, since the inter-world stands closer to the luminous center of the cosmos (Chittick, 1992: p. 137). Muslims believe that the most frightening experience one encounters after death is when the two dread-inspiring and fearsome angels (Munkar and Nakīr) visit the soul to ask it about its belief in God, religion, and prophet. Answering these three questions (Allah, Islam, Mohammed) respectively and correctly, the believing soul is immediately rewarded by having the grave expanded and illuminated until the Day of Resurrection. It is believed that the fate of the deceased is determined when she or he answers the three fundamental questions correctly. Muslims also believe that this postmortem experience provides the deceased with a clear indication of where he or she will spend their eternity. The Muslim belief in the significance of this test inspires the family to perform many good deeds during the funeral rituals on behalf of the deceased. The family will continue performing these good deeds during the forty-day grieving period. These actions serve as a way to ask Allah to have mercy and provide the deceased with strength and guidance to correctly answer these three questions. Depending on the outcome of this test of the grave, the deceased’s soul takes on shapes that symbolize either the good or bad deeds performed while alive. Al-Ghazali writes, [o]n the Day of Resurrection, meanings are bared. Then form takes on the color of meaning. If the person had been dominated by passion and greed, he will be seen on that day in the form of a pig. If he was dominated by anger and aggressions, he will be seen in the form of a wolf. al-Ghazali cited in Ogilvie and Bajaj, n.d. Al-Ghazali’s usage of the ‘he will be seen’ is meant to be figurative speech that highlights how the deceased’s deeds reflect on him or her on the Day of Resurrection. Al-Ghazali’s argument, though, reflects how Muslims, in general, believe that on the Day of Judgment, everyone’s deeds will be exposed. In the Islamic faith, death is always welcomed since Muslims believe that the short stay on this earth is nothing but a preparation for eternal life. ‘Whosoever has a loving desire to meet with Allah is one whom Allah has a loving desire to meet’ (Abū al-Laith al-Samarqandī, 1962 [reprint]: p. 197).

4  The Islamic notion of the afterlife and sectarian differences In order to appreciate the description of the afterlife from an Islamic perspective, it is pivotal to understand the cosmological background of Islam. Allah asserts in the Qur’an that he created the earth and seven heavens for his creatures. Yet, these seven heavens, according to Jason Gray (2015), should not be thought of as seven distinct destinations for the dead. Rather the heavens 359

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are spatial-temporal regions distinct from earth (Islamic scholars debate the exact nature of each).Yet, descriptions about paradise and hellfire abound.These detailed descriptions are meant to 1) provide hope so Muslims engage in performing good deeds, and 2) instill fear so they avoid moral corruption. To illustrate, paradise is described in detail with its eternal garden and stream of wine, milk, and honey. Equally important, hell is described as a place that tortures and punishes the body and soul with boiling water to drink and scalding food to eat (Mufti, 2015). Interestingly, scholars such as Khouj (1988) argue that the reason for providing such detailed descriptions of heaven in simple language is meant to contrast with more typical depictions of figurative heavens as large as the sky and earth combined (p. 61). While Muslims are eager to learn more about the afterlife, paradise, hell, and other aspects of their existence after death, their intellectual curiosity seems limited when it comes to learning about the nature of Allah. Certain Muslim theologians emphasize the existing distance, both spatial and temporal, that separates the physical world in which we live from that of the afterlife. A similar argument can be made regarding the nature of Allah. The Qur’an (42:11) stresses, ‘There is nothing like Him.’ What it suggests is that Allah cannot be understood in terms of our physical world (Lange, 2015: p. 179). Muslims believe that our mental capabilities of understanding phenomena of the nature of Allah, the afterlife, and so forth are very restricted. Aside from presenting an overall picture about paradise and hell, contemporary Muslim writers are still hesitant or simply choose not to discuss the afterlife at all. Rather, they are satisfied with the confirmation about the reality of the day of resurrection and human accountability based on one’s deeds. Yet, there is no provision of a detailed discussion about the issue. One potential explanation for this lack of discussion is that during the nineteenth century one branch of Islam, Sufism (which is understood as the inner, mystical, or psycho-spiritual dimension of Islam) focused mainly on the hereafter while turning away from life in this world (Smith and Haddad, 1981: p. 100). Similarly, in the Muslim world, one should not question the Qur’an since the latter remains off limits to any type of questioning. Yet, interpretations vary depending on where the political wind blows. One does not have to look far to realize how suicide bombers, for instance, are convinced, based on interpretations provided by some very conservative Muslim scholars, of being granted paradise after blowing themselves up. These interpretations argue that the martyr’s death is worth pursuing. Yet, dying in Allah’s cause has not been well-defined or explained by these conservative scholars. What is common among Muslims, however, is that, martyrs or not, there remains a fear about death. Even for those who argue that those dying for Allah are at peace, death is not without fear. The thinking is that those who suffer death in support of God’s cause are certain of his pardon for their faults, as the Qur’an suggests (O’Shaughnessy, 1969: p. 65). Nonetheless, what is important to emphasize is that we should not assume that the latter assertion applies to suicide bombers who twist the Qur’an’s interpretation regarding martyrs in order to justify their barbaric acts. The Qur’an reads, ‘If anyone slays a human being – unless it be [in punishment] for murder or for spreading corruption on earth – it shall be as though he had slain all mankind,’ (Assad, 2003: pp. 171, 172). What the latter Qur’anic verse suggests is that the interpretation of the Qur’an is used to justify whichever end one chooses. Interestingly, according to Islamic teaching no one has the right to take his or her own life. Doing so, one is destined to go to hell. Muslims are taught at an early age that it is Allah who gives life, and only Allah has the right to take it. The debate within the Muslim world is still limited vis-à-vis how convinced some are regarding the descriptions of paradise, hell, and the afterlife, among others. Yet, to what extent the characteristics described above are accurate, that decision rests with the adherents of the faith (Islam in this case), readers, and those with intellectual curiosity. What is known is that Muslims from all walks of life, of all colors and persuasions, have, since Islam was founded in about 610 ce, 360

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perceived the afterlife with all its aspects, to be true and real. Some Muslims use the Qur’an as the foundation on which to base their judgment that ‘the life of this world is nothing but a passing delight and a play – whereas, behold, the life in the hereafter is indeed the only [true] life’ (Qur’an 29: 64). Thus, to borrow from Le Goff, what is perceived by the Islamic eschatological imagination is ‘the whisper of a world more real than this one, a world of eternal truths’ (Lange, 2015: p. 16). There remain many unanswered questions. For instance, how can the Qur’an provide details about paradise and hell, but be very limited in describing the intermediate state between death and resurrection (al-Barzagh)? Could this be part of why many Westerners do not have a full grasp of the elements that compose the Islamic eschatological picture? It is possible! What is interesting is that some of the scholarly Arabic sources of the eschatological manuals have not been translated. The only available writings in English vis-à-vis the afterlife can be traced to the Indo-Pakistani subcontinent since the area was, historically, colonized by Great Britain. This suggests that Muslim scholars might focus their efforts in translating materials regarding issues of the hereafter so that Western audiences have a better understanding and a clearer overview of what the ‘Transitional World’ is all about. Under no circumstances am I suggesting that there is no Islamic scholarship about concepts of afterlife, soul, resurrection, and so forth. Scholars such as Allamah Sayyid Muhammad and Husayn Husayni Tihrani have written extensively about the afterlife, the judgment day, and the destiny of the soul, and have explained the three stages of existence. They argue, for instance, that the physical world we live in is one that consists of matter and nature. The intermediate world, however, is one that is free from matter and does not emerge once the physical world ends. Rather, it encompasses the material world. The descriptions Muhammad and Tihrani provide vis-à-vis the realm of the soul suggest that this level is not only higher and more powerful than the other two, but also more mysterious. They suggest that the world of the soul is not only beyond the ability of human mind to fathom, but also goes beyond the limitation of time (Muhammad and Tihrani, 2015: pp. 327–228). Within this context, Muslim scholars such as al-Ghazali stress that death is unpredictable and can happen at any time and, as such, Muslims should always be thinking in terms of doing good deeds. Similarly, death is perceived as a gateway from this short, but mortal, existence to a life of immortality and eternity (Sajid, 2009).This view regarding death suggests that notions of the afterlife affect death rituals and customs in Islam. Before addressing the above assertion, it is crucial to highlight the difference between the two main sects of Islam (Sunnis and Shi’ites) vis-à-vis the afterlife debate.While there are minor differences between the two when it comes to prayers, both are allowed to combine prayers when travelling. However, Shi’a Islam allows the combination of prayers even when one is not travelling. As a result, this practice has become a contentious issue among non-Shi’a religious schools. Yet, when it comes to the notion of death and the afterlife, there is general consensus in both sects that the soul continues to exist after death. Furthermore, a Muslim, whether a Sunni or Shi’ite, is provided an opportunity during her or his life on earth to impact and prepare the soul for better or worse, depending on the nature of her or his deeds (good or bad). In one poignant passage, the Qur’an reads, ‘There comes a time when death approaches any of you, and he then says, “O my Sustainer! If only Thou wouldst grant me a delay for a short while, so that I could give in charity and be among the righteous”!’ (Assad, 2003: p. 989). Still, there are major differences between Sunnis and Shi’ites when it comes to issues of, for instance, grave visitation, decoration of graves, and so forth. For instance, Sunnis forbid the decoration of tombs and the conduct of ceremonies and memorials at graveyard sites. Similarly, there is currently an ongoing debate regarding women’s visitation to the graves. While in Sunni Islam this practice is strictly prohibited, it is widely accepted in Shi’ite Islam.The latter perceives 361

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visiting and praying at the graves of innocent Imams as an emphatic religious ritual (and is a ritual that became popular at the turn of the sixteenth century when the Shi’ite denomination became the official religion in Iran; Aramesh, 2016: p. 20). Equally important, funeral rituals in the Islamic tradition tend to expose differences and similarities between Shi’ites and Sunnis. Of specific note in this context is the work of Philippe Ariès who, in addition to describing how attitudes toward death have evolved, addressed how both Sunnis and Shi’ites share a common view regarding death. For instance, both Shi’ite and Sunnis agree that the process of embalming (preservation of a corpse from decay) is strictly haram (forbidden) in Islam.This is because it is believed that any type of procedure on a corpse (including cryopreservation and autopsy) are contrary to Islamic teaching and laws. Islam’s justification for forbidding this practice is that embalming leads to 1) delay in burial, 2) disrespect of the corpse, and 3) physical violation of the body. Because of these reasons, Islamic tradition strictly emphasizes the need for the corpse to be buried as soon possible. Like other religious matters where differences among religious sects are prevalent, apparently there are some misguided rulings that allow Muslims to embalm their dead under certain circumstances.The argument is that if certain conditions exist, such as the presence of contagious diseases like typhoid, then allowing embalmment to prevent a greater harm is permissible, though not widely approved or practiced in the Muslim world. It is also worth noting that in the Muslim world, burial rituals differ from one region to another. The causes range from tribal influences and customs to religious ideology and culture. These factors play a pivotal role in determining the components of these rituals. To illustrate, I argue that the so-called Islamic dress, abaya (clothing that some Muslim women wear that covers the entire body from head to foot) is completely non-Islamic, as it is neither prescribed, nor required, according to the Qur’an or Sunna. Rather, it is a tribal tradition limited to pockets living in the Muslim world – Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran,Yemen, and Pakistan, among others. Similar regional preferences apply to funeral and burial rites and how they vary across cultures within the Muslim world. Though they might be similarly Muslim, each culture has its own concept of death and the afterlife. For instance, Muslims in Bosnia perform burial rituals that are much different than those in Pakistan or India. The Bosnian rituals include ‘remains of the deceased as a first step in moving on, otherwise the survivors may not even accept that the deceased has died. The belief is that without performing the rituals, the deceased may be unable to proceed to heaven’ (Gire, 2014: p. 15). Thus, while there are general Muslim beliefs, there remains regional variation and interpretation.

5  The washing of the corpse and preparation for the afterlife Similarly, Assous’ (2013) research focused on Algeria, a Sunni Muslim country, and examines how the concept of the afterlife impacts funeral rituals and how the deceased’s family does its utmost to ensure that its loved one is sent off under the best conditions. Assous’ research reflects the centrality that death and the afterlife occupy within the Muslim community, whether in Algeria and Egypt, or Jordan and Morocco. The conclusion of her research confirms the notion most Muslims share: the washing of the corpse serves as a hygiene of the self. Muslims should not fear death, and washing a dead person remembers them with the respect a human being deserves (Assous, 2013: p. 293). Another point that merits emphasis is that Assous’ investigation reinforces the Islamic teaching encouraging Muslims to perform good deeds all the time while alive. Most Muslims believe that once a Muslim dies, he or she finds nothing but his or her own attributes. These attributes reveal themselves to him or her in a form appropriate to his new abode (Nasr, 1997: p. 396). 362

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While different faiths devote special ritualistic care to the treatment of the deceased’s body, the notion of the afterlife, from an Islamic perspective, influences the performance of funeral rituals. The Qur’an speaks more prominently of the eternal afterlife using images of paradise, the Garden of Eden, flowing springs, and an abundance of fruits (Gray, 2015) than it does using the language of hell, punishment, and agony. This highlights the need for Muslims to perform good deeds while on earth, which, in addition to God’s mercy, would grant them admittance to paradise. This deep conviction regarding the afterlife sets the stage for how a Muslim family treats its deceased loved one. One of the rituals Muslim families perform as their loved one is dying is Talqeen (reminding the dying of the two shahadas: I bear witness there is no God but Allah and that Mohamed is his servant and prophet). The purpose of the Talqeen is to ensure that the dying individual is spiritually ready for their journey into death. Equally important, the practice of thoroughly washing the body and applying fresh fragrances to the corpse serves a specific purpose: preparing the body for its journey into the afterlife. Furthermore, the family of the deceased offers readings from the Qur’an, serves funeral meals, conducts prayers, and performs other good deeds such as charity for the poor. It is imperative to highlight the importance and significance of the ritual washing, the meaning of enshrouding the body in kafan (white cloth), and Ṣalāt al-Janāzah (the funeral prayer). It is believed that reading from the Qur’an when one is dying eases the dying person’s transition as he/she takes their last breaths. Further, the dying is obliged to endure the darkness and ‘torment of the grave’ in a purgatory between death and the resurrection (Starkey, 2009: p. 297). Muslims believe that at this phase (being in the grave) the deceased briefly travels to the hereafter and then returns to the grave to await the final judgment. While the methods, traditions, and style for washing the corpse differ and vary from one Muslim country to another (or even within a community), they all share a common objective: physically cleansing the body. Bathing the corpse adheres to Islamic tradition and follows in the footsteps of the Sunnah. In Islam, washing the corpse should occur immediately after death (except in cases of violent death or mutilation when the body is kept in a morgue and wrapped in a shroud to minimize fluid leakage). What follows the washing of the corpse is the enshrouding of the deceased in a white cloth. Like washing, the shroud holds significance in the Islamic tradition because it demonstrates respect for the dignity and privacy of the departed. The type of material, style, and color of the cloth used in shrouding vary from one region to the next, though shrouds are generally white, simply woven, in one piece, simple, and modest. Generally, washing is performed by members of the same gender as the deceased. However, contemporary Muslim scholars debate whether husbands should wash and prepare the body of their wives for burial. Historical records suggest that Fatima (Prophet Mohamed’s daughter)’s husband, Ali ibn Talib, was absent during her preparation for burial. Following her death, a century later, Muslims debated vigorously whether husbands should, or should not, play a role in preparing their wives for burial. No consensus was reached back then as those who supported the notion that husbands were entitled to wash their dead wives argued that ‘Ali ibn Talib, Fatima’s husband, had, on the contrary to some sources, undertaken the ritual washing of his wife’s corpse’ (Halevi, 2011: p. 2). However, Muslims, nowadays, ensure that when it comes to washing the deceased body and preparing it for burial, the consensus is that female washers wash deceased females, and male washers wash deceased males. As to funeral prayer, Muslims of the community where the deceased is located gather together to offer prayers asking forgiveness and mercy on behalf of the deceased’s soul. The prayer also serves as a reminder to the congregation and attendees that death is inevitable and everyone should prepare for it. It is worth noting that the funeral prayer does not include bowing or prostrating since doing so, according to Islamic teachings, is only reserved for Allah, alone. 363

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The funeral prayer, however, consists of repeating the Takbir (consisting of Allāhu Akbar, ‘Allah is great’) four times.

6 Conclusion It is fair to state that despite human curiosity and imagination, we are unable to provide a clear and detailed description about the hereafter, paradise, hell, and other aspects of the next world. The reason being is that, by design, Allah limits human capacity (and experience) when it comes to understanding future events pertaining to the afterlife. There is a reason why Allah reveals these descriptions to his prophets: to demonstrate the importance of living a balanced life while understanding the connection between existence on earth and the existence in the hereafter. What is evident is that in the Islamic tradition, the afterlife not only takes center stage within the religious teachings and narrative, but is also part of the future following one’s death. While some aspects of the new life in the hereafter are meant to resemble those of the earthly life, Muslims think of the afterlife as a place of joy, free from pains and agony (Rustomji, 2009: p. 22).Yet, Muslims display a firm commitment toward the belief that having access to paradise depends greatly not only on the adherent’s performance of good deeds when alive, but also on Allah’s mercy and grace. Similarly, the notion of the afterlife influences funeral rituals as the family of the deceased enacts good deeds on his or her behalf in the hope of a peaceful transition and eventual admittance to paradise, if Allah wills it.What seems nearly universally accepted among Muslims, regardless of their religious affiliation and socioeconomic status, is that life is a bridge into the hereafter. And on the Day of Judgment, one will be judged fairly and justly, and depending on the outcome of that judgment, one will either be admitted to heaven or thrown into hellfire for eternity. Key words: Islam, afterlife, paradise, hell, funeral rites

Further reading Lange, C. (2015) Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions. New York: Cambridge University Press. An examination of different afterlife understandings in the Muslim world. Rustomji, N. (2009) The Garden and the Fire: Heaven and Hell in Islamic Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. This book is an important examination of afterlife conceptions, and particularly heaven and hell in Muslim culture. Ariès, P. (1982) The Hour of Our Death. New York:Vintage. This is a good cultural study of death as understood in the West in comparison to other cultures. Assous, A. B. (2013) ‘Cultural and Islamic Values In Relation With Death,’ European Scientific Journal, 9(5), pp. 280–300. An interesting case study on Muslim values and death.

Bibliography Abū al-Laith al-Samarqandī (reprint 1962) ‘Traditions about the End,’ Reprinted in English translation in Jeffery, A. (ed). A Reader on Islam: Passages from Standard Arabic Writings Illustrative of the Beliefs and Practices of Muslims. ‘S-Gravenhage: Mouton, pp. 197–250. Aramesh, K. (2016) ‘History of Attitudes toward Death: A Comparative Study between Persian and Western Cultures,’ Journal of Medical Ethics and History of Medicine, 9, pp. 1–6. Ariès, P. (1982) The Hour of Our Death. New York:Vintage.

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An Islamic perspective Assad, M. (2003) The Message of the Qur’an. London: Oriental Press. Bensaid, B. (2015): In Service of God and Humanity: The Legacy of Shaykh Muhammad al-Ghazali. London, Washington: The International Institute of Islamic Thought. Brighet Assous, A. (2013) ‘Cultural and Islamic Values in Relation with Death,’ European Scientific Journal, 9(5), pp. 280–300. Chittick,W. C. (1992) ‘Your Sight Today Is Piercing’:The Muslim Understanding of Death and Afterlife,’ in: Obayashi, H. (ed). Death and Afterlife: Perspectives of World Religions. New York: Greenwood, pp. 125–139. Gire, J. (2014) ‘How Death Imitates Life: Cultural Influences on Conceptions of Death and Dying,’ Online Readings in Psychology and Culture [online] 6(2). Available at: http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/view content.cgi?article=1120&context=orpc [Accessed 14 January 2017]. Gray, J. (2015) ‘Islamic Belief about the Afterlife,’ The Immortality Project [online]. Available at: www. sptimmortalityproject.com/background/islamic-belief-%20about-the-%20afterlife/ [Accessed 15 January 2017]. Halevi, L. (2011) Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society. New York: Columbia University Press. Kassis, H. (1997) ‘Islam,’ in: Coward, H. (ed). Life After Death in World Religions. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, pp. 48–65. Khouj, A, M. (1988) The End of the Journey: An Islamic Perspective on Death and the Afterlife. Washington, DC: Islamic center. Lange, C. (2015) Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions. New York: Cambridge University Press. Moreman, C. M. (2010) Beyond the Threshold: Afterlife Beliefs and Experiences in World Religions. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Mufti, K. (2015) ‘Belief in Life after Death,’ IslamReligion.com [online]. Available at: www.islamreligion. com/articles/38/belief-in-life-after-death/. [Accessed 15 January 2017]. Muhammad, A. S. and Tihrani, H. H. (2015) Life After Death: Resurrection, Judgment and the Final Destiny of the Soul. Chicago: Kazi Publications. Nasr, H. S. (1997) Islamic Spirituality: Foundations. New York: Crossroad Publishing. Ogilvie, D. and Bajaj, A. (n.d.) ‘A Partial History of Afterlife Beliefs,’ www.rci.Rutgers.edu [online]. Available at: www.rci.rutgers.edu/~ogilvie/HistoryAfterlife.htm#_ftnref1. [Accessed 19 January 2017]. O’Shaughnessy, T. J. (1969) Muhammad’s Thoughts on Death: A Thematic Study of the Qur’anic Data. Leiden: Brill. Rustomji, N. (2009) The Garden and the Fire: Heaven and Hell in Islamic Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Sajid, A. (2009) ‘Death and Islam: For Muslims, Life Decides the Afterlife,’ NewStatesman.com [online]. Available at: www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-faith-column/0000/00/holy-qur-muslims-life-death. [Accessed 20 January 2017]. San Filippo, D. (2006) ‘Religious Interpretations of Death, Afterlife & NDEs,’ Faculty Publications [online] 32. Available at: http://digitalcommons.nl.edu/faculty_publications/32/ [Accessed 20 January 2017]. Smith, J. I. and Haddad, Y. Y. (1981) The Islamic Understanding of Death and Resurrection. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Starkey, J. (2009) ‘Death, Paradise, and the Arabian Nights,’ Mortality, 14(3), pp. 286–302. Waugh, E. H. (1999) The Islamic Traditions: Religious Beliefs and Healthcare Decisions. Chicago:The Park Ridge Center.

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29 COFFINS, CANDLES, AND CAMERAS Aspects of Brazilian funerals from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century Andréia de Sousa Martins 1 Introduction A Brazilian wake – or velório in Portuguese – is the most important funerary ritual in the country. This ritual has seen little change through the passing of time, throughout the sanitary, religious, cultural, and political reformations that transformed the way Brazilians deal with death. The word ‘wake’ is a suitable translation for velório. However, ‘wake’ has been widely used by native-English scholars when referring to other rituals which are not quite like a velório or like the definitions of ‘wake’ found in English dictionaries and encyclopedias. From a Brazilian perspective, this can lead to a general confusion about what wakes actually are. As a death researcher, I had some difficulty understanding that the word ‘wake’ was occasionally misused in academic literature. Authors are not always concerned with giving further details describing the exact ritual they identify as a ‘wake.’ Many times the ritual they label as a ‘wake’ couldn’t, in my understanding, actually be called by that term. This is mostly the case when ‘wake’ is used as a synonym for ‘viewings’ and ‘visitations,’ which are periods of time spent with the deceased, but can be just a few minutes to a couple of hours. A ‘wake’ to me is a longer period spent in the company of the deceased. A ‘viewing’ or a ‘visitation,’ therefore, does not classify as a wake. A wake is a vigil, not a visit (Grainger, 2017). In the UK, the word has even been used to describe a gathering with tea and cake after a burial or cremation, which is completely inaccurate and even misleading to researchers who understand wakes as longer lasting rituals around the dead body before disposal. This confusion is sustained by the fact that the Cambridge Dictionary (2017) refers to wakes as an occasion when the family and friends of a dead person meet in order to look at the dead body the night before it is buried, or when they meet after a dead person has been buried to drink and talk about the person’s life. To me, the second definition of wake offered by this dictionary is inaccurate because there cannot be a wake without a body. After being confronted by this, I started to think that maybe other researchers didn’t understand what I meant either when I wrote my research on virtual wakes in Brazil.To avoid further 366

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confusion, I am going to clarify a few things. As a Brazilian thanatologist, I understand wakes as gatherings around the body before disposal. To that extent, they are quite akin to velórios, the Brazilian wake, especially when entries by specialized encyclopedias, rather than dictionaries, are taken into consideration (Howarth and Leaman, 2001; Bryant and Peck, 2009; Kastenbaum, 2003).What makes velórios different from the broad English language use of ‘wake’ is the amount of time spent with the deceased. There are other specific factors, some of which I will explore further in this chapter, but as far as terminology goes, I will address the ritual I study – the velório (virtual or real) – by its Portuguese name, the term ‘wake,’ or the designation ‘Brazilian wake’ when clarification is needed. I will identify its online form as a ‘virtual wake,’ an expression I coined in a past study recognizing differences from what Americans call ‘funeral webcasting’ (Martins, 2013). The virtual wake and the American funeral webcasting have significant differences. I hope that this chapter will aid in identifying distinguishing characteristics of a Brazilian ‘virtual wake.’

2  Velório, a Brazilian wake In essence, in a contemporary velório, coffins, candles, and cameras serve as particular markers of Brazilian identity. Before focusing on these particularities, however, I will start with a short description of how velórios are generally set up in urban parts of the country, briefly indicating a few aspects which have changed from the nineteenth century onwards. Organized as soon as the body is released from bureaucratic procedures, which depend on the cause of death and on the need for examination by a coroner,1 a velório is normally held hours after death. Brazilian state laws from the 1900s on required burials to be carried out no later than 36 hours after death. Since burial remains the main form of disposal in the country, with a 95% preference over cremation (Lewgoy, 2016), Brazilians organize velórios as soon as possible. The body, after being washed, prepared, and clothed, is displayed in the middle of a room. In the nineteenth century, this room would be in the deceased’s house, or, depending on social status, in the church or a public venue (Reis, 2003). Throughout the twentieth century, this room increasingly became one which was built specifically for the purpose of the velório in funeral homes: a sala de velório. In the last portion of the twentieth through the twenty-first century, funeral companies transformed these rooms into centrais de velórios, or ‘wake centers.’ These buildings annexed to funeral homes, cemeteries, or crematoriums often have several rooms with the capacity to hold multiple velórios concomitantly. A velório is structured in a similar way to that of a ceremony, but a lengthy one. It can last from 12 to 24 hours.This length of time, together with the continual display of the body for the whole duration of it, is the main aspect that makes the velório different from viewings, visitations, funerals, or memorial services. Another basic difference is that the involvement of funeral directors in velórios in contemporary Brazil is practically inexistent. Since Brazilian bodies are rarely embalmed, funeral directors are responsible for the removal and preparation of the body for the velório, but they do not preside, organize, conduct, or host the velório itself in any way. Brazilian funeral directors are only providers of funeral paraphernalia, unlike funeral directors in the United Kingdom and the United States of America who also oversee the rituals (Véron, 2009). This function of the funeral director is another major difference between Brazilian wakes and other rituals which are sometimes wrongfully called ‘wakes.’ In Brazil, there is a very small duration of time between the death and the disposal of the body, unlike in England, for example, where a funeral can be organized in up to two weeks after death (Morell and Smith, 2006). In England, the word ‘funeral’ itself can refer to only a memorial service, with no viewings or visitations to the body. This small duration of time in Brazilian 367

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velórios, followed by a lengthy ritual, may give the impression to some North American and European observers that Brazilian wakes are quite disorganized and rushed. Brazilian wakes may lack formal invitations, indication of dress code, someone to tell attendees where to sit, music, video or photograph projections, readings, and sermons; all of these features are optional. What actually characterizes a Brazilian wake? Brazilian wakes traditionally have an open coffin with the deceased, surrounded by family, friends, acquaintances, flowers, candles, and occasionally cameras. Brazilians have the ability to transform this into quite a lot. Some of the aspects that are now absent from contemporary velórios were once part of the country’s death rituals. Brazilian funeral directors were once a great part of the organization of a velório, especially during the nineteenth century. Their responsibility, however, was not linked to the body, which the family would clean and dress. Rather the funeral directors organized the deceased’s house for the velório in a process called the armar a casa, or ‘setting up the house’(Reis, 2003). This ‘setting up’ consisted of draping black and dark cloths in the windows, covering mirrors, stopping clocks, closing doors and drawers, and displaying symbols of death inside and outside of the house so that the neighborhood would be aware that somebody had died in that particular residence. With the shift in the way death and the dead were perceived in the country, especially after the Sanitary Reformations, the role of the funeral director shifted to the care and preparation of the deceased’s body, leaving the family to prepare the velório. The Brazilian velório lacks a specific structure in the sense of having someone presiding or conducting it. Whenever a religious figure or venue would be ‘included’ in a velório, it would be understood more as a funeral mass than as a velório. Brazilians call a funeral mass a missa de corpo presente, meaning ‘a mass with the body of the deceased on display.’ However, it was quite possible that even before this funeral mass at the church, for example, there was a gathering at the deceased’s house, classified as a velório even if it lasted for a slightly shorter duration than the standard 12 to 24 hours. Specialized wake centers appeared in the middle of the twentieth century, especially in heavily urbanized areas where people tend to live in apartments instead of houses. I believe this development was a practical move as well as a result of the Sanitary Reformations in the previous century. This change in society resulted in a broader denial of death. By removing wakes from the deceased’s home (now more commonly a flat), neighbors and the general public would be spared from having to share an elevator with a dead body or having to encounter a coffin by the bottom of the communal stairs. Because of this change, the organization of wakes shifted back into the hands of funeral directors in the twentieth century in the sense that they also provided the space for the wake along with the paraphernalia, but nothing more in terms of the way wakes were actually held. Celebrants remain an unrequired part of the velório. Velórios are organized and conducted by the family or those closest to the deceased who gather around the body. These Brazilian wakes can last for up to a day after death.The velório, in this sense, is the first of three rituals which happen in immediate sequence following a death. The cortège follows the velório as the second ritual in the sequence. The cortège is a funeral procession to the place of disposal. The third ritual in the sequence is the disposal itself, called the enterro (‘burial’) or cremação (‘cremation’).Whenever Brazilians say ‘funeral,’ they allude to the combination of these three rituals (velório, cortejo, and enterro or cremação). This chapter follows this convention of referring to all three rituals together as a ‘funeral.’ Paper invitations were commonly used in the 1800s, especially by the wealthy who could afford to pay for the preparation of such notices. Since their circle of acquaintances would be larger, they employed this type of communication to inform family, friends, and acquaintances of the death and subsequent velório. For the poor, who used to live in close-knitted communities, 368

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the news would be spread by word of mouth.The means of spreading the news of a death developed in the twentieth century as communications technology developed and became accessible to the less wealthy. Telephones became the main means for informing a community about a death. It is now quite common for Brazilians to send text messages, emails, or posts on social media about a death, depending on the relation to the deceased as well as the time and place of the velório. The information concerning the velório is expected to be available almost at the same time that one learns about the death itself.Thus, Brazilians do still issue invitations to their wakes, though not just paper invitations. These invitations are gradually becoming more and more virtual. Brazilians traditionally wore black during the nineteenth century. During the twentieth century there was a gradual change in this custom, and other colors became accepted. Black remains the traditional color in the twenty-first century, but not a mandatory choice. Specific colors can be used if asked, but this is not a common practice because of how quickly velórios are organized, and attendees might not own clothing in the requested color. Having to acquire the requested clothing color is an additional stress factor that many mourners prefer not to inflict on others in this emotional time. Contemporary salas de velório (‘wake rooms’) are constructed so that the coffin is always displayed in the middle of the room, and attendees literally stand around it with limited sitting space. The coffin is always open with the body on display, unless restricting factors prevent an open coffin velório, such as a contagious disease, the inability to cosmetically reconstruct the body for presentation, or special request from the deceased prior to death. Physical displays of mourning such as crying are common. In fact, some nineteenth-century Brazilians believed that the tears would help the deceased’s soul to depart (Reis, 2003). Crying was encouraged and sometimes performed professionally by carpideiras: wailing women hired for this purpose.Wailing women are still available for hiring, especially in the countryside. In large, urban cities such as São Paulo, they are less common, and I could safely say there are only a few which are widely known to the general public. They define their service as not just professionally crying, but also as serving as stimulators of emotions among others (Pereira, 2012). Without a ceremony-like structure and someone to conduct or preside over it, attendees hold conversations in which they reminisce about the deceased, pray, offer support to the bereaved, or catch up with those whom they have not seen in a long time. Strangers are not currently as welcome as they once were in previous centuries. They may still attend contemporary wakes, but their engagement with other attendees will be limited, or they will just be observers. These interactions fill the time during the velório, being periodically interrupted by communal, spontaneous laments or prayers. Brazilian wake-goers are not expected to stay for the whole duration of the ritual. Those who do stay the entire time generally do so to show respect for the deceased and his or her family. It is quite common, however, in 24-hour wakes, for colleagues and acquaintances to arrive in the last couple of hours, so they can pay their respects, acknowledge the bereaved family, and then also participate in the cortège and disposal. Wakes that last that long are intended not only for spending time in the company of the deceased, but mainly to allow those who need to make travel and work arrangements to arrive in time to say their own goodbyes. Attendees may sing songs, laments, or hymns, which other attendees may join, though generally no recorded or live music is played. Video or photography projection is quite unheard of, mostly because it requires time and preparation, which are hindered by the limited period between death and arranging the funeral. Attendees may also perform readings or speeches. Sermons can be delivered by a priest, pastor, or other religious figure, but religious figures tend to be present only near the end of the wake. This religious figure mainly arrives to bless the 369

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deceased before the coffin is closed, which indicates the end of the wake and the start of the procession to the place of disposal. The moment in which the coffin is closed is one of the most emotional times of the velório as it is the last chance to look at the face of the deceased. After this, the coffin is loaded into the hearse, and attendees follow in their own cars. Limousines or other cars are not hired for composing the cortège, as traditionally found among British funeral processions (Morell and Smith, 2006). The cortège brings the deceased, most frequently, to a prepared grave at the cemetery. Mourners will sing, lament, pray, and present stronger emotional demonstrations while the coffin is lowered into the ground, as this is the final goodbye. Rounds of applause are also common. Attendees tend to oversee the closing of the grave, and only then they will disperse. Contemporary Brazilian funerals do not offer drinks (apart from water and coffee) or food during or after the velório. Most wake centers, however, have a cafeteria or coffee shop. Attendees thus generally depart after the conclusion of the funeral.This brief description of the development and practice of Brazilian funerals is only an introduction to the rituals in the country. In the following pages, I will concentrate on three key aspects of funerals, especially velórios, in urban Brazil from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century: the use of coffins, candles, and cameras.

3 Coffins Brazilians prefer coffins over caskets, with the latter being quite uncommon in the country. One of the explanations for this might be that the whole reason for the velório was – and still is – to take care of the body. The body is on display, not the coffin. The coffin is merely a vessel to contain the body because the wake is the deceased’s last meeting with relatives and loved ones, and the first with the ancestors (Reis, 2003). Even if the velório features a caixão lacrado (‘a sealed coffin’),2 the body is still prepared to look as best as it can. During most of the 1800s, coffins were altogether absent from Brazilian wakes.When used, coffins only appeared at the end of the velório to transport the body to the place of burial. This transportation function did not mean that the person would be buried in the coffin. It was possible to rent coffins, mainly from religious brotherhoods and confraternities. During the vigil, bodies were displayed enveloped in a shroud, on top of a tarimba – a type of raised platform. Shrouds were preferred so individuals could convey a sense of modesty and/or demonstrate their devotion to a specific saint or affiliation to a religious order. This preference would be indicated in a last will and testament, or left to the direction of family members. Wealthy, poor, and slaves alike were part of confraternities and brotherhoods, whose main duty was to provide not only decent, but also stately funerals for its members. The wealthy, however, also used the brotherhoods and confraternities to elaborate their own funerals even more (Reis, 2003). The powerful confraternity of Santa Casa da Misericórdia buried its members with pomp, and part of this was due to the fact that they were, up to the end of the eighteenth century, the only ones allowed to use special biers, or tumbas, to carry the dead. There were several types of tumbas, ranging from good quality wooden platforms to litters and stretchers (Reis, 2003). By the beginning of the nineteenth century, black brotherhoods gained the right to own their own biers and litters. This change contributed to a gradual increase in the use of coffins in the country during that century. The use of coffins considerably increased in the last half of the 1800s. They were mainly rented from religious brotherhoods and confraternities. Coffins were still too expensive for a one-time use, a luxury reserved for the wealthy. Another reason to belong to a brotherhood, apart from demonstrating faith and devotion, or having easier access to a coffin, was to guarantee the presence of attendees – the other members of the brotherhood – at one’s funeral. At the 370

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time, it was understood that more people attending the funeral was better because there would be more prayers said in the favor of the deceased’s soul. Because of this, not only family, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances were welcome to the funeral, but also other members of the community who might have been unknown to the deceased and his or her family. The Sanitary Reformations introduced in the second half of the 1800s gradually shifted the treatment and disposal of dead bodies.The strongest reason for those changes was the belief that the cadaver was poisonous.Thus, it would be dangerous for untrained people – such as the family members of the deceased – to prepare the body for the velório. Trained professionals, such as funeral directors, came to oversee the dangerous job of preparing the corpse for the wake. Under this new understanding, burials could no longer take place inside or near churches, which were mainly located in the heart of the cities. Funerals were redirected to cemeteries located far away, preferably on hill tops, to facilitate the dispersion of foul and dangerous gases (Reis, 2003). Brazilians initially resisted the push to begin burying their dead in distant cemeteries. This happened mostly because traditionally, these cemeteries were not auspicious places: any burial place other than a church or churchyard was intended for the disposal of outlaws, thieves, prostitutes, foreigners, atheists, and the suicidal. Public revolts, like the Cemiterada, which resulted in the destruction of a new cemetery by the populace in Salvador (Reis, 2003), were a demonstration of this resistance as early as 1836. A complete change was only achieved gradually and slowly in the twentieth century. The slow pace of these changes resulted not only from the negative connotations that cemeteries held, but also because Brazilians were – and still are – very superstitious, and these changes could interfere with their superstitions. Many of these superstitions were related to the corpse and the coffin, as narrated by historian and anthropologist Luís da Câmara Cascudo (1951). Examples provided by Cascudo state that the body was always displayed, during the velório, with its feet positioned towards the main door of the house. Mourners kept the body in this position when placing it in the coffin and throughout the cortège.As Cascudo writes, one should ‘leave to the grave through the feet, in opposition to how one enters the world’ (1951: p. 21). Another belief was that those who carried the coffin out of the velório should continue carrying the body through the cortège into the cemetery. Superstitions dictated that one who began carrying the body, but failed to see it to the burial site would soon die. To stop a cortège in front of a house would mean bad luck for those living in the house. The speed of the cortège also had significance. A hurried procession would mean an ‘invitation’ for other deaths. Though nowadays understood as mere customs, these behaviors are still present in Brazil. These changes in the handling of the dead resulted in the development of the modern Brazilian funeral industry in the twentieth century. These changes emerging out of the Sanitary Reformations caused a shift in the roles and responsibilities of family members and funeral directors. The rise of this industry allowed for an increased level of individualization in funerals by offering more affordable single-use coffins that could remain present throughout the velório. These coffins could then contain the body from the velório to the disposal.

4 Candles The Portuguese word for candle, vela, derives from the same root for the Portuguese velório (‘wake’). Both terms have their etymologic origin from the Latin vigilare: ‘to invigilate’ or ‘be vigilant’ – an activity at the core of Brazilian velórios. In the nineteenth century, candles were an important part of the funeral decorations used to ‘arrange the house’ for a velório. Candles thus served as a primary way of announcing the death of an individual. As with other items, the quantity and quality of the candles used in funerals reflected the wealth of the deceased. For example, the upper class preferred silver candlesticks with thicker candles that would burn 371

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longer. The family could spend large sums of money (sometimes equivalent to half the price of a two-story townhouse) to light the whole event (Reis, 2003). Those of less economic means would use wooden candlesticks with smaller, thinner, and generally fewer candles. Regardless of quantity or quality, candles needed to be present during velórios. Candles not only provided light for those who spent the night in vigil, but also kept bad spirits away. Because of this, candles were similarly surrounded by folklore and superstition throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was believed that candles which flickered without apparent wind signaled the presence of a ghost or the arrival of a message from the beyond which required interpretation (Cascudo, 2001). The velório was the period during which the soul of the deceased would be most vulnerable to evil forces, which hovered nearby. For this reason, the presence of people and candles during the velório helped in protecting the deceased. A solitary dead body was an easy target for the devil (Reis, 2003). As an added protective measure, an extra candle was placed in the hands of the corpse to light the path to the afterlife. The hands were also tied with rosaries. This candle was always new and needed to be burned to the end so it could never be re-used (Martins, 1983).The understanding was that this candle, as with other items that touched the deceased after death, belonged to the deceased and thus to the realm of the dead (Cascudo, 1951). As it was customary for burials to happen at night in the 1800s, the burning of candles also came to represent the divine as well as the extinguishing of a life (Reis, 2003). This symbolism revolved around the antagonizing, yet complementary, associations of light with the living and darkness with the dead. They believed at the time that the living could exert some control over the dead through light (Martins, 1983). For more practical purposes, candles were distributed to funeral attendees to light the cortège as it passed through the city streets. For those who belonged to confraternities and brotherhoods, there was a certain guarantee of an increased number of candles being burnt on his or her behalf. All members were required to participate in funeral rites wearing their robes and carrying candles, and the chaplain had the duty to leave at least eight candles burning on the brotherhood’s church altars whenever he was accompanying a funeral procession (Reis, 2003). Last wills and testaments often provided instructions to distribute candle arrangements to funeral attendees (Reis, 2003). The distribution of candles, as with the selection of a shroud and other funeral paraphernalia, demonstrated the wealth, grace, and charity of the deceased. It was very common, after the funeral, for attendees to take whatever was left of the candles to light their own homes. This custom further provided hope that prayers would continue to be said on behalf of the deceased after the funeral. Although the role of candles diminished in the second half of the twentieth century as a result of the popularization of electricity and the rise of safety concerns surrounding their continual burning, Brazilian funerals still reflect the symbolic significance that candles once held. Modern centrais de velórios (‘wake centers’) make use of electrical lamps specially designed to look like candles. Mourners still light candles in favor of the deceased at churches, places of worship, and domestic altars. In this sense, even if candles are not present in their original form during funerals, they are still part of the contemporary imagery of death in Brazil. Modern Brazilian customs still feature special ‘seven-day candles,’ which are designed to burn for seven days. This seven-day time period is considered to be the duration required for the soul of the deceased to complete its journey to the afterlife.

5 Cameras Photography was invented in the second half of the 1800s. By the final decades of the century, it already assumed a symbolic significance for remembering the peaceful transition of the Brazilian dead into the afterlife (Koury, 2001). This kind of photography was understood mainly as a 372

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Catholic and Christian depiction of the good death. Photography served as a way to preserve the deceased’s presence amongst the living, as a remedy for loneliness and forgetting. Brazilian mortuary photography practices initially captured the face of death: this photography custom began by showing the deceased in relaxed positions, well dressed for the velório, and generally laying inside a coffin as if asleep (Koury, 2001). In addition, it could also portray the attendees, which would gather around the coffin. Because of this setting, this type of photograph was mainly taken just before the velório, during the velório, or immediately preceding the burial. As with other items, this photography often served as an indication of status. During the nineteenth century, postmortem photographs of deceased Brazilian children had a mystical sense to them. The image of the deceased child, now an angel, would provide protection and act as an intermediary between their family and God. Thus the photograph reflected an everlasting connection with the divine (Koury, 2001). For children and adults alike, this last image would, depending on the family, figure in albums or be displayed in a place of honor. These albums often resided on a household altar and could serve as a basis for the creation of a photo-painting, which would feature the deceased in a portrait as if he or she was alive (Riedl, 2014). Koury’s (2001) research on mortuary photography in Brazil reveals that the custom of photographing the dead remained present during the twentieth century for a fraction of the urban population. The photography custom often served as part of a family tradition or provided a last visual remembrance of the dead. He found, however, that a majority of his interviewees opposed the practice by linking mortuary photographs to feelings of disrespect, religious taboo, or because they preferred to remember the deceased as he or she was when still alive. Koury suggests that these photographs can also be interpreted as mementos of pain and loss (Koury, 2001). Up to the first decade of the twenty-first century, these photographs, when taken, indicated that the presence of the camera itself was a one-off occurrence.The photograph mainly featured in a domestic and private setting. In the Northeast region of Brazil, they would be displayed proudly on a ‘memory wall,’ which was normally located in the same corner as the household altar (Riedl, 2014). With the advent of the Internet and the popularization of smartphones, during the 2010s the private aspect of mortuary photographs was transformed by the taking of selfies at funerals (Meese, 2015). Mortuary selfies transformed the practice of funeral photography. Mourners no longer gather together around the deceased for communal photographs. Rather, mourners came to pose by the coffin mostly individually, in order to take a photograph themselves using their smartphones. They can then upload the image to social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. The strongest premise in this case is that if all other aspects of life are now shared online,3 why wouldn’t death be shared as well? The first decade of the twenty-first century welcomed another kind of camera in Brazilian funerary rituals. Recently, Brazilian velórios may include a fixed camera for recording and broadcasting the wake in video form through the Internet. Brazilians now call this new use of digital technologies velório virtual, or virtual wake, a term coined in my Master’s dissertation (Martins, 2013). The virtual wake was first offered in Brazil in 2001, with a similar service appearing in the United States of America in the same year.The North American version of the virtual wake was called ‘funeral webcasting’ or a ‘live stream funeral.’ Since the Brazilian velório is organized in such a short period of time, attendees must often make the necessary travel arrangements in an equally short period of time in order to participate in the ritual. As the country continues to grow and its population becomes increasingly mobile, attending velórios has become less straightforward.The online option was created to enable those who cannot be physically present to do so virtually. The virtual wake is a real-time transmission of the images of the actual wake, happening at the funeral home’s wake center.The virtual wake offers private and public options. 373

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The private option is secured by logins and passwords which are shared at the discretion of those organizing the wake. The public option is open for anyone to access on the funerary company’s website. This public option thus allows others, including strangers, to join and watch the virtual wake – an unexpected development of the technology idealized for bringing family and friends closer in such delicate times. This development is still quite new for the general Brazilian public, but there are thousands of members of a Facebook group entitled Profiles de Gente Morta (PGM), or Dead People Profiles, who are aware of the existence of the virtual wakes and watch them regularly.This group, which focuses on cataloguing the links of deceased Facebook users as a real-time obituary (Martins, 2013), was created in 2004 in another social network, and discovered the virtual wakes in 2008. Since then, some of its 15,000 members have been watching the broadcasting of wakes for different reasons, as I explored in a previous netnographic study (Martins, 2013).These reasons can be quite personal and varied, but mainly they are related to curiosity, a sense of religious or social duty, as well as a reaffirmation of life. Those watching the virtual wakes of strangers can sit comfortably behind their computers, protected by virtuality, to observe and make comments in the Facebook group.Virtual observers mostly discuss key aspects of the wake, such as the flowers, attendees, color or shape of the coffin, or how the deceased was placed inside of it. These discussions can prompt PGM members to share their own experiences and views on death and dying as well. The participation of some virtual observers resembles behavior reminiscent of the 1800s code. They watch a virtual wake to keep the deceased company, especially in wakes with fewer attendees, and even to pray for the deceased. However, given the uniqueness of the virtual wakes in the Brazilian funerary scene, the behaviors around it are still changing and transforming.

6  Final considerations The popularization of coffins in Brazil by the end of the nineteenth century coincided with an increase in individuality, which can be interpreted not only as a physical delimitation of the dead body, but also of death itself and those welcomed to approach it. This change, in combination with the Sanitary Reformations which removed the dead from the center of the communities, contributed to an overall distancing of death from daily life, which continued in the following centuries. Before the popularization of coffins, limits between death and society were blurred: death was a part of life and funerals were social happenings. The series of rituals recognized the loss of not just an individual, but of a member of society. Those who belonged to the deceased’s community were not only welcomed, but expected to participate in those rituals. The dead were close by, accessible, and continued to be part of the society through folklore and religion. The propagation of coffins triggered an increase in the need for individualization in death. By the twentieth century death itself became a private matter. The notion of community was reshaped as the Brazilian population grew and social groups became smaller. With these social changes, the expected attendees of a funeral reduced from a broadly defined community to only those who knew the deceased or his or her family. Funerals no longer served as a place that openly welcomed the attendance of strangers. The twentieth century similarly witnessed the gradual transition away from the folklore and superstitions of the nineteenth century. Although these folklore and superstitions diminished, the behaviors born out of their traditions continue to echo into modern Brazilian mortuary practices. The twenty-first century sees the continuation of these behaviors, some remodeled through technology, and this technology offers possibilities which can transform the Brazilian way of death once more. 374

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The displaying of the body for the velório – a practice that has remained present in the country’s culture throughout centuries – might be one of the reasons why cameras are becoming more welcomed in Brazilian wakes. In addition to the custom of the wake, in the twenty-first century, social networks have somehow become a representation of north-eastern Brazil family houses, with its ‘memory wall’; the main difference being the reduced privacy. It is as if the door was left open and any passer-by can look at the faces of those dearly departed. It is as if the memory wall has become a display window. The virtual wake technology enables strangers to join in velórios in a similar way to that of the nineteenth century. They can again participate and observe, and acknowledge the death of a fellow man. The idea of being able to keep the deceased company or praying in their favor through a computer screen is an example of technology enabling Brazilians to rescue some of the country’s funerary customs that became obsolete over the last hundred years. This rescue, if it continues, will likely develop gradually, in the same way as the changes which triggered the loss of those earlier customs. The possibility of this rescue shows that technology offers nothing but options. Key words: Brazil, wake, velório, internet wakes

Notes 1 This examination is only compulsory in suspicious or violent deaths. Normally, a similar and simpler exam is conducted, depending on the circumstances and place of death. 2 In this case, the coffin is not only closed, but sealed, with the purpose of stopping attendees from opening it during the wake. Some may attempt to open the coffin as a result of their strong reaction to the loss, especially in tragic circumstances. 3 Including aspects which were also considered taboo at some point, like sex, with the creation of the #aftersex hashtag.

Further reading Cascudo, L. da C. (2001) Superstição no Brasil. São Paulo: Global. A seminal work on Brazilian folklore and superstition originally published in 1951, which is only available in Portuguese, but has had several reprints. Martins, J. de S. (ed). (1983) A morte e os mortos na sociedade Brasileira. São Paulo: Hucitec. An edited volume on different aspects of death and dying in Brazil, which is only available in Portuguese. Reis, J. J. (2003) Death is a Festival: Funeral Rites and Rebellion in Nineteenth-century Brazil. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. A comprehensive work on Brazilian death rituals in the nineteenth century and the ways which led them to change.

Bibliography Bryant, C. D. and Peck, D. L. (eds). (2009) The Encyclopedia of Death and the Human Experience. London: Sage. Cambridge Dictionary (2017) Wake. In Cambridge Dictionary [online]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Available at: http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/wake. [Accessed 11 February 2018]. Cascudo, L. da C. (2001) Superstição no Brasil. São Paulo: Global. Grainger, R. (2017) Wake. In Encyclopedia of Death and Dying [online]. Available at: www.deathreference. com/Vi-Z/Wake.html. [Accessed 11 February 2018]. Howarth, G. and Leaman, O. (2001) The Encyclopaedia of Death and Dying. London: Routledge. Kastenbaum, R. (2003) The Macmillan Encyclopaedia of Death and Dying. New York: Thomson Gale.

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Andréia de Sousa Martins Koury, M. G. P. (2001) Imagem e Memória: ensaios em antropologia visual. Rio de Janeiro: Garamond. Lewgoy, J. (2016) ‘Os custos do enterro e da cremação,’ Exame.com [online]. 31 May. Available at: http:// exame.abril.com.br/seu-dinheiro/os-custos-do-enterro-e-da-cremacao/. [Accessed 27 March 2017]. Martins, A. de S. (2013) Platéias da Morte: discutindo o fim da vida em comunidades e Velórios Virtuais. Master’s Dissertation. João Pessoa: Universidade Federal da Paraíba. Martins, J. de S. (1983) A morte e os mortos na sociedade Brasileira. São Paulo: Hucitec. Meese, J., Gibbs, M., Carter, M., Arnold, M., Nansen, B. and Kohn, T. (2015) ‘Selfies at Funerals: Mourning and Presencing on Social Media Platforms,’ International Journal of Communication [online], 9, pp. 1818– 1831. Available at: http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/3154/1402. [Accessed 31 March 2017]. Morell, J. and Smith, S. (2006) We Need to Talk About the Funeral: 101 Practical Ways to Commemorate and Celebrate a Life. Bedlinog: Accent Press. Pereira, J. C. (2012) Os ritos de passagem no catolicismo. Rio de Janeiro: Mauad. Reis, J. J. (2003) Death Is a Festival: Funeral Rites and Rebellion in Nineteenth-century Brazil. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Riedl, T. (2014) ‘Memórias de despedida: o memento mori na fotografia e na fotopintura Brasileira,’ in: Rodrigues, C., Lopes, F. H. and Menezes, R. A. (eds). Sentidos da Morte e do Morrer na Ibero-America. Rio de Janeiro: EDUERJ. Véron, B. (2009) ‘Funeral Director,’ in: Bryant, C. D. and Peck, D. L. (eds). Encyclopedia of Death and the Human Experience.Volume 1 of 2. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, pp. 469–472.

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30 BUYING AN AFTERLIFE Mapping religious beliefs through consumer death goods1 Candi K. Cann

1 Introduction In the contemporary United States, the death business is booming, and more and more retailers are moving into the death industry market. Costco and Walmart, two giant retailers, started offering caskets and urns at a discount price in their stores and online in the mid-2000s (Fredrix, 2009), with the Internet giant Amazon not far behind. Many funeral homes display showrooms filled with sample caskets and urns in order to help consumers make their decisions regarding the final resting place for themselves or their loved ones. However, consumer choices in the marketplace of death goods are not solely based on issues of price, status, and availability, but are also heavily influenced by conceptions and understandings of the afterlife, with notions of the afterlife translating into different consumer choices in disposal and interment. Choosing to have a body embalmed, the choice of interment locations and type, including the selection of a particular casket, are all deeply intertwined with various understandings of the afterlife, and the views of the body after death. Consumer choices in these cases are often determined by imagined embodiment and are influenced in part by non-rational consumer choices based on religious upbringing and belief. In turn, diasporic and religious identity can be reinforced and solidified through consumer choices that then fulfill religious imaginations of post-death embodiment. Belk,Wallendorf, and Sherry, in their seminal article, ‘The Sacred and the Profane in Consumer Behavior: Theodicy on the Oddysey,’ argue for the study of material objects from the point of view of ‘the sacralisation of the secular from the realm of consumption’ (Belk, Wallendrof and Sherry: p. 9), stating that as the world becomes more secular and consumptiondriven, consumer goods and choices increasingly reflect values of the sacred and profane. Additionally, the body, itself, can be viewed as a manifestation of the sacred, as it manifests both self and identity, through status and belonging to a community (Belk, Wallendorf, and Sherry: p. 12). Deathcare goods and services, then, both reflect and embody individual and communal understandings and assumptions of the divine, while simultaneously providing practical disposal of the body. This article traces the history of the relationship of consumer death goods with both the implicit and explicit relationships these material goods have with religious worldviews, examining the differences of deathcare consumer choices between religious actors of various faiths.

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2  The dead body: corpse preservation consumer choices When people think of death consumer goods, they often think of the most obvious ones – caskets and burial plots – but they often forget that embalmment is actually another consumer good offered by the deathcare industry, though it may not be a durable or lasting good. Embalmment is often utilized by funeral homes when there is going to be a visitation before the cremation or the funeral service, itself, as it is one way that the funeral home can maximize its control over the corpse and minimize unwanted noises or movements of the corpse during a viewing or a service. Embalmment in the United States is not required by state or federal law, though many consumers are unaware of this, and many funeral homes will refuse to offer visitation unless the consumer first chooses to embalm the body, resulting in embalmment offered as a default service and product as a part of funeral packages, and many consumers believing that this rule is a legal one, rather than one of convenience. In fact, the Federal Trade Commission requires funeral homes to inform families that embalming is only required when a body crosses state lines. In addition, ‘five other states – California, Idaho, Kansas, Minnesota and New Jersey – require embalming when the body leaves those states by common carrier (airplane or train)’ (Funeral Consumers Alliance website,). Finally, embalmment is strictly cultural, and though widely practiced in the United States and Canada, is not a common practice worldwide. Many people mistakenly believe that not embalming presents a social hazard, while the opposite is true; the chemicals involved in embalmment are extremely toxic, and embalmers are required by law to wear full body protection and a respirator while embalming (Funeral Consumers Alliance website,). However, part of the success in selling embalmment services to consumers is predicated on the notion that corpses, themselves, are inherently unhygienic and present a danger to society. The main reason for embalming’s continued popularity in the American deathcare industry is three-fold: 1) it is a service with a wide profit margin, and therefore has traditionally been widely sold as an integral part of the funeral service package; 2) it allows the funeral home to offer visitations and viewings with much more flexibility in regards to scheduling times; and 3) it allows for the pliant cooperation of the deceased so that there are no awkward moments (noises, movement, etc.) of the corpse during the viewing or funeral service itself.These reasons behind embalmment (with the exception of number two), however, have been largely underemphasized, and as a result, many consumers do not actually know the real reasons behind embalming of the deceased, instead viewing embalmment as an essential part of the funeral service. In fact, the Funeral Consumers Alliance argues that embalmment is treated as the cornerstone of the funeral service package in the funeral service industry, and consumers who choose embalmment are ripe for the upsell of other deathcare goods (Funeral Consumers Alliance website,). Caleb Wilde, popular author and blogger of Confessions of a Funeral Director, echoes this sentiment and writes, ‘Morticians have been taught that embalming is the foundation of the funeral business’ (Wilde, emphasis added). Since many funeral homes refuse to hold visitation without embalming the body first, it is the pivotal service that the majority of the other deathcare goods hinge upon. A person who purchases embalmment services because of a fear of bodily decay and contamination will be considered an optimal consumer to purchase other deathcare goods that offer ‘protection’ from external decay, such as hermetically sealed caskets and vault liners (the irony, of course, being that bodily decay starts within, not without). The embalmed body also offers a tie to the imagined afterlife for the deceased, reinforced by language employed by the funeral director regarding the deceased. The deceased is not just a dead person, but a person preparing to ‘meet their maker’ or ‘passing on’ to another dimension. Funeral home workers are encouraged to utilize euphemisms in selling their products to deathcare consumers, while emphasizing the professionalism and medicalization of the funeral 378

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industry in such a way that the body becomes ‘acceptable’ for public viewing and mourning consumption. Glennys Howarth writes in her book Last Rites: The Work of the Modern Funeral Director that ‘if the body is not to be displayed, the funeral director is divested of two key professional tasks incorporated in decontaminating and humanizing the body. . . . [Embalming allows] funeral directors and embalmers . . . to demonstrate their skills in “resurrection” work’ (Howarth: p. 137, emphasis in original). Howarth asserts that it is the embalmer’s job to make the corpse appear as though it is sleeping, an altered corpse after death contributing to the imagined afterlife.

2.1  What is embalmment? Embalmment drains the corpse of all of its bodily fluids, replacing these fluids with a preservative fluid treated so that it will help make the body more pliant to the touch, slow down decomposition, and bring underlying color to the skin (often the fluids are dyed so as to provide the skin with underlying color). Additionally, embalmment also means that the funeral home will stuff the cheeks with cotton (cheeks often sink after a person has died), wire the mouth shut (so it won’t accidentally open during visitation), place plastic eye caps or more cotton under the eyelids (to round out the eyes and keep the eyes from accidentally opening), arrange the corpse (which sometimes means massaging or wiring the limbs into place), and applying makeup on a corpse so that its pallor can be made lifelike once again. Additionally, there are small plugs placed in the cavities of the body to prevent leakage, or sounds from escaping the body during visitation. Embalmment is anything if not extremely unnatural and incredibly invasive, and what started as a practical necessity to allow for the preservation of the body for burial has turned into a standard practice in many funerals.

2.2  A brief history of embalmment Embalmment has a long history, from upper class Egyptians several thousand years ago to various royalty and rulers throughout history, but in the United States the practice of embalmment became standard during and following the American Civil War in 1861–1865, when Civil War leaders needed to preserve the bodies of the dead soldiers so that they could be returned home for burial. Embalmment allowed for bodies to be preserved for their transport back home so that the families could bury their dead. The expansion of the railroad across the United States, the introduction of refrigerated railway cars, and the extensive network of federally funded highways across the U.S. in the next century (Cann, 2014) also led to the popularity of the practice of embalming, as families began to spread out across the country, leading to an increased need to delay funeral services and preserve the corpse until the extended family could gather together to mourn the deceased and hold the service.

2.3  Embalmment costs The cost of embalmment varies widely from funeral home to funeral home and is generally the most expensive service sold. Embalming is considered a separate service from the preparation of the body for viewing, which is usually listed under the category of ‘other preparations,’ and includes services such as makeup, dressing the deceased, and placing the corpse into the casket so that they are ready for viewing. No ‘other preparations’ are needed if the family of the deceased does not choose to purchase embalming, as it is generally assumed that the family will then opt for either direct burial or direct cremation. However, even if the family chooses not to opt for embalming, 379

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funeral homes usually charge for refrigeration and preparation of the corpse.The ‘special care’ listed for autopsies and organ donations are to cover the costs required to stuff and sew up the body when there have been invasive procedures performed on the corpse following death, sometimes also requiring additional makeup to make the deceased look presentable for a viewing. I have listed two examples of the price lists below from two American family-owned funeral home websites, and these prices are representative of average prices of these services in the northeast corridor. Peabody Funeral Home Embalming $875 Other preparations (including cosmetology, dressing, casketing) $295 Special care after organ donation $295 Special care after autopsy $295 Washing and disinfection when no embalming $295 www.peabodyfuneralhome.com/ServicePrices.htm Ruck Funeral Home Embalming $895 Other preparations $300 Washing and disinfecting when no embalming $275 Ruck Funeral Home; www.ruckfuneral.com/home/index.cfm/services/pricelist/ fh_id/1202 Most noticeably, though, is the inclusion of the last service in nearly every funeral home’s website, regarding care for the body if one elects to bury or cremate the body without embalming. This service is ‘washing and disinfecting when no embalming,’ and a survey of funeral home price lists reveals a fairly consistent charge for the preparation of the body for disposal that seems to nearly always include ‘disinfection.’This service includes the cleaning of the fingernails, washing of the hair, and washing the body with a germicidal solution meant to kill bacteria and viruses. The inclusion of this service on the price list emphasizes sterilization and implies that the corpse itself is not clean. The funeral home does not merely perform the service of washing the corpse, but sterilizes and disinfects it as well. This implies that death is something contagious and dangerous, rather than natural and commonplace. This is an important point, as the implication is that the corpse cannot be handled by the family and that only the funeral home has both the skills and the materials to actually care for the corpse and prepare it for disposal.This is further emphasized in the embalmment statement given on the price list by the funeral home. Funeral homes in the United States are required by law to let consumers know that embalming is not actually required by law. However, many funeral homes add on to the original statement. One such example is given here: Embalming may be necessary, however, if you elect certain arrangements, such as a funeral with viewing. . . . This charge includes disposal of regulated medical waste and compliance with OSHA Bloodbourne Pathogen, Formaldehyde, Hazardous Material Communication and Health and Safety Standards/Regulations. Peabody Funeral Home The first portion of the statement (non-italicized) is the portion all funeral homes are legally required by federal law to include on their price lists. However, the italicized portion of the statement emphasizes the corpse as both unhygienic and even possibly dangerous to both health 380

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and safety. As I wrote earlier, though, the only truly dangerous materials are those used in embalmment itself.The statement that the funeral home operates in compliance with discarding the OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] ‘Bloodbourne pathogens’ echoes the earlier implications that the corpse is either dangerous or dirty. In reality, the number of diseases that can be spread through contact with the corpse itself is extremely low (for example the Bubonic plague, or most recently, the Ebola virus), and people are more likely to contract diseases from other attendees at a funeral than they are from the dead body itself. What is important, however, is the emphasis placed on the unhygienic nature of the corpse in an age of sterilization and medicalization. In other words, by (mis)leading the consumer to believe that a corpse must be disinfected through the process of embalmment, the funeral industry is able to upsell other products as well. Jessica Mitford touched upon this in her book The American Way of Death Revisited, in which she described a funeral director who asserted that ‘an unembalmed body can only be viewed by the legal next of kin, and then only for a few moments. This has to do with liability of the funeral home for “blood-borne pathogens!!” ’ Mitford goes on to write ‘(One of the more dazzling flights of fancy; as any pathologist will tell you, a dead body presents no risk whatsoever of infecting the living when there’s no contagious disease.)’ (Mitford, 1998: p. 202). Given the strong cultural identification of the funeral industry’s emphasis on sterility and medicalization of the corpse, how, and in what ways, do religions contribute or challenge the deathcare industry’s emphasis on the need for embalmment and preservation of the corpse?

3  Religious worldviews and disposal practices Despite the supposed practicality behind the increase in the practice of embalmment, it is not practiced in some religions – namely Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, and yet, it is commonly practiced among Christians (both Catholics and Protestants) residing in North America.This tendency is in part because of religious worldviews, afterlife beliefs, and imagined embodiment, which have been both perpetuated by, and capitalized upon, by the deathcare industry. This is not to say that all those who embalm are Christians; rather, that the practice of embalmment seems to utilize Christian symbolism and language that underscores and privileges Christian rhetoric, to the extent that embalming is largely accepted and practiced in Christian circles (with exceptions, of course – Dutch Reform, Amish Americans, Jehovah’s Witness, and Eastern Orthodox branches of Christianity, for example, do not practice embalming in their communities). Before moving into an exploration of Christians and embalming, however, I will briefly explore the religious viewpoints of those who generally reject the practice of embalmment (one must note here that, even in embalmment, there are exceptions).

3.1  Jews and embalmment Jews prefer to bury the deceased immediately and do not embalm the body or condone its viewing, considering it to be disrespectful to the deceased. For this reason, Jewish services for the dead are usually held as soon as possible after the death of a person. Preparation of the dead body proceeds according to Ecclesiastes 5:14, in which it is written, ‘As he came, so should he go’ (Funeral Practices Committee: p. 3). Thus, when a person dies, their body is washed and purified just as they were when they were born. Taharah is the traditional Jewish act of washing and purifying the body, and is generally performed by a person trained in the traditional Jewish purification rituals. Men wash and purify men, and women wash and purify women. Usually this act includes washing the body with warm water from head to toe, though they will never turn the 381

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body face down. The most meaningful aspect of these rituals is their communal aspect – at no point is the deceased left on their own following their death. From dying to death to burial, the Jewish community accompanies the deceased in their journey. After the body has been washed and purified, the body is dressed in a traditional white shroud, known as a tachrichim. Jewish people are never buried in their traditional clothes, but in a white shroud made of linen or muslin. The idea behind this is that all are found equal in death, and therefore no person is deemed better or wealthier. The white shroud is symbolic of equality in life through death (in other words, though one may be materially successful in life, in death, all are dead). In addition, usually the shroud is hand-sewn so that the stiches will easily disintegrate; if the shroud is machine-sewn, usually someone will rip some of the seams of the burial shroud so that it disintegrates easier. The tachrichim is so important to Jewish burial custom that if one is not found to dress the body, then the funeral will be postponed until one can be obtained. Jewish men are also buried with their prayer shawl, the tallit, a traditional fringed shawl that is usually used by Jewish men during prayer. Before burial, one of the fringes of the prayer shawl will be cut so that it is rendered ineffective. If the deceased did not own a tallit, then usually one is found and provided for the burial. Genesis 3:19 (‘By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken for dust you are and to dust you will return,’ Holy Bible, NIV Version) states that the proper cycle for the deceased is to return to dust, and for this reason, it is preferable for a Jew to be buried directly into the ground in a burial shroud. The Jewish cosmological view of the afterlife varies from branch to branch and person to person, with some Jews believing in a place called Sheol, where all the dead, both righteous and unrighteous, go after their death (Werse discusses this in great detail in his chapter of this book, so I am only generalizing here). Like most faiths, however, individual Jews vary in their understandings of the afterlife. Some have believed in a resurrection, others in reincarnation, while finally, other Jews reject the notion of the afterlife altogether, or simply see it as irrelevant, stating that their purpose is life itself and a relationship with God in this life. For most Jews, though, observing God’s command to return the body to dust is also an acknowledgement of God’s role in the Jewish cycle of life from creation to death. Thus, embalming is not customarily practiced in the Jewish community and is generally frowned upon.

3.2  Muslims and embalmment Islam also rejects embalmment, and the deceased is usually buried within 24 hours of death, except in the case of practical constraints (such as when the coroner or medical examiner cannot be reached to sign the death certificate, or an autopsy needs to be performed). Like Judaism, in Islam, women wash and purify the female bodies for burial, and men prepare the men, and many Muslim cemeteries also have rooms for the preparation and washing of the body before death. As in Judaism, there is no visitation or viewing, and embalming is not merely rejected but considered unnecessary, only allowed when required by law. If there is a need to delay a funeral, generally the deceased is refrigerated for preservation services, but this is an extremely rare َ ِ‫�نَّ ِهلل َو�نَّـا �ل َ ْي ِه َراج‬‎ ‘Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un’ ‘Indeed we practice. In the Qur’an, it is written ‫عون‬ ‫إ إ‬ ‫إ‬ belong to Allah, and indeed to Him we will return’ (Qur’an, Surah 2, verse 156), and this verse is recited immediately upon learning of a death. Muslims believe that they all go to a final judgment before God, and one’s afterlife is dependent on the outcome of that judgment (for more detail on Islam and notions of the afterlife, see Oualaalou’s chapter in this book). Though less stressed in contemporary Islamic thought, traditional belief dictated that the dead inhabited an in-between world called Barzakh, where one has a temporary body and awaits judgment. There are many different descriptions of Barzakh, and some describe it as a type of Muslim purgatory, 382

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where souls can be prayed for and have earthly deeds ascribed to them while waiting for God’s judgment (Afikul Islam). For this reason, it is essential to follow the Muslim rituals regarding the disposal of the dead, for every act on behalf of the dead can affect their judgment in the afterlife. In both Judaism and Islam, there is no viewing or visitation because it is considered to be disrespectful to God. Even excessive mourning is discouraged as it can be a sign that one has not submitted oneself to and respected the will of God who has decreed the time and place of death for the deceased. Both Judaism and Islam have strict proscriptions prohibiting the cutting of flesh (tattooing for example), and thus invasive practices involving the body are considered violations of God’s creation. This belief thus extends to embalmment, which is invasive and unnecessary. It is significant that the Jewish and Muslim proscriptions against embalming have not influenced the contemporary Christian tradition.

3.3  Buddhism, Hinduism, and embalmment In Buddhism, most people prefer to be cremated, and generally, like both Judaism and Islam, the body is prepared and washed, usually in the home of the deceased, and in the presence of family and close friends. The body is then dressed for burial, offerings are made, and the body is prepared for cremation. Though Buddhist burial rites vary by country and sectarian branch, generally a Buddhist undertaker comes to the family’s home to prepare the body for cremation, as Buddhists believe the soul lingers near the body for days following the death. For this reason, absolute respect must be given to the body until it is cremated, and it is treated as though the body is still alive; this is why bodies are not generally embalmed, only washed. Buddhism has many folk tales and ghost stories regarding souls that come back to haunt the living because proper care was not taken with their dead bodies (for example, see Mai’s chapter on Vietnamese Buddhism and ghosts in this handbook). When the body is then cremated, the eldest son (or occasionally in contemporary times, daughter) is called upon to light the funerary pyre, or push the crematory button to begin the cremation process. In Buddhism, the lighting of the cremation flame is considered to be the second and final death (Suzuki, 2000). In Hinduism, as in Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism, the body is washed, and dressed in burial clothes for the funerary pyre. In India, it is customary to burn a body near a river, so that the soul has access to the purification and cleansing nature of the water (see both Ramlakhan and McDaniel in this book for more on Hindu death traditions). Hindus living in the United States, however, generally opt to cremate at the crematorium with the close family members present, followed by a memorial service at the temple, and then finally a scattering of ashes in the ocean of the United States, or the ashes are sometimes reserved and transported back to India for scattering at a later time (AUHJT Funeral Ceremony Guidance in USA, 2014). In Hinduism, embalmment is generally rejected, and the body is cremated within 24–48 hours. In both Hinduism and Buddhism embalmment is deemed unnecessary, as the body is cremated, and the cremation occurs very quickly following the death. Both Buddhism and Hinduism believe in the cycle of life, death, and rebirth, and cremating the bodies allows for practitioners to burn their bodies and free the souls for preparation into the next life. Buddhism and Hinduism reject the practice of embalmment, though their reasons for rejecting embalming as a practice vary. It is important, though, to note that the practice of embalming in North America is not strictly based on geographic or cultural tendencies, as Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists residing in the United States all generally reject embalmment in their disposal practices, electing to keep the traditional disposal practices associated with their religious worldviews in spite of living in North America. The practice of embalming then cannot be strictly confined to cultural geography and the socio-cultural influences of American culture. 383

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Nor, however, can the practice of embalming be directly linked to Christian belief systems, as Catholics and Protestants in Europe and Latin America do not widely embalm the deceased. The question then remains – why do North American Catholics and Protestants embalm more than their Christian counterparts in other countries, and why does this group, more than any other religious group in the United States, prefer to embalm their dead, even though practitioners of other religions have generally resisted the larger cultural trend towards embalmment?

4  The afterlife and imagined embodiment in Christianity The importance of the embalmed body is that it is simultaneously the actor and the acted upon; it is the subject and the object; the deceased, yet no longer fully human; dead, yet not dead. The embalmed corpse, devoid of its organs and its fluids, stuffed and sewn, is now an actor with a part in a ritual of mourning meant to comfort those who encounter the body in its newly sterilized and purified form. The embalmed body functions as both a realization of the past and a projection of anticipated future. The embalmed body – present, but transformed – operates as a bridge between reality and the imagined, its artificial corporeality reinforcing the place of tension between death and afterlife. If the body can continue to play a vital role in the community without its organs, without its owner operating its body, then perhaps an afterlife becomes possible as well. In early and medieval Christianity, one of the signs of favor with God was the preservation of the corpse. Considered a miracle, many saints were identified through the lack of deterioration of their corpse and were labelled as ‘incorrupt corpses,’ the integrity of the skin linked to the integrity of the soul. Incorrupt corpses are known by their sweet odor (the ‘odor of sanctity’) and their lack of decomposition. Many incorrupt corpses were discovered because of dreams or miracles, and upon being dug up from the ground, revealed to be intact. The top feature of an incorrupt corpse is the corpse’s pliability, and they are often placed on display in churches, hands folded in prayer, or even sitting in prayer. Incorrupt corpses often became some of the more popular figures in the Catholic church, as they gave people a sense of hope regarding their own afterlives. The rotting of bodily flesh was often linked to the soul’s time in purgatory – a visible window into the events going on in the afterlife, and those corpses that stayed intact were believed to be evidence of God’s favor and afterlife (Carroll Cruz, 1977).The preservation of the body thus has a history in Christianity of being associated with the afterlife. However, in stark contrast to this view of embodied sanctity, early American Puritans focused on the separation of this life and the next, arguing that death was a natural fact of life, and burials should be handled stoically and as a matter of course. The body was viewed not as an earthly window into the afterlife, but as an impediment to it. Puritan funerals buried the body quickly, as the focus of the funeral service was to bring one closer to God, through the acceptance of his will. In his recent book, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Towards Death, 1799–1883, Gary Laderman argues that the shift in American Protestant views to the corpse (and the embalmed corpse, in particular) occurred around the Civil War with Evangelical Protestants. He writes, Evangelicals did not ignore the corpse – it simply began to serve a new purpose, functioning as an instrument for healing the pain of survivors who had to confront the death of a friend or relative. In a culture that was moving away from the stern, dogmatic, and oppressive sensibilities of the Puritan past and toward the Romantic, sentimental, and domestic characteristics of the nineteenth century, evangelicals reappraised how to make sense of death and the dead body. The new religious culture that was emerging contributed to the establishment of four trends in northern Protestant 384

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attitudes towards death: valorization of the affections of the survivors, memorialization of the dead, augmentation of the spiritual possibilities of the next world, and domestication of the corpse. Laderman, 1996: p. 55 American Protestant evangelicals thus utilized the corpse as a way to move away from the more austere practices of the Puritans, but the corpse that became center stage in this religious culture was not the decomposing body, but the sterile, cosmetic, and embalmed one. In describing the afterlife, Christians often recall the Bible verse of 1 Corinthians 15:54–56, ‘When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory” ’ (NIV). Death that appears as life through the embalmed body began to become a symbol of the evangelical victory over death itself and was viewed as a foretaste of the afterlife to come. In fact, a sign at Arlington National Cemetery on the McClellan Gate, constructed in 1871 (and the only gate from this period in the eastern portion of the cemetery that remains), proclaims the relationship between embalming and sanctification, tying these two together with American nationalism and military heroism. It reads, ‘Rest on embalmed and sainted dead!’ The popularity of embalming as a service in American funerals is not merely the result of cultural forces, or purely interpreted by religious beliefs; both the exponential growth of the funeral home industry as a private industry and the medicalization and professionalization of dying and death are also to be taken into account. I would argue, however, that the privatization of American industry and American denominationalism went hand in hand to create a ripe consumer culture in which funeral directors were able to effectively create a cultural rhetoric surrounding death and grief, in which embalming became a symbol of American progress, modernity, success, and the manipulation of time (corpses that can wait on the living vs. the other way around), bodies, and space.

5  Plotting an afterlife: caskets and cemeteries Casket choices are another consumer death good affected by religious worldviews, and today, there is a rich assortment of casket choices available on the market. Once more commonly known as coffins, the term coffin was changed to casket by the funeral home industry to indicate a box, such as a jewelry box, that holds something precious and of value. In this way, the funeral home industry succeeded in domesticating the term coffin to a term that implied delicacy, emphasizing the preciousness of the contents rather than the ugly reality of the death. Funeral homes have also become more inventive in the last forty years as well, offering innovations on caskets that include everything from interchangeable corners, to casket lid inserts and cap panels, to liner rentals. Innovations in caskets have been popular in the last twenty years with companies like Crazy Coffins (www.crazycoffins.co.uk/) offering custom-built caskets that look more like art installations than coffins. Caskets come in a wide variety of materials, ranging from cardboard to metal, and the price variation is equally wide, ranging from hundreds of dollars to tens of thousands. As discussed at the beginning of this chapter, Internet and retail distributors have also moved into the casket market, with everyone from Amazon to Walmart offering coffins on the cheap. A keyword search on Amazon for caskets returns over 16,000 available choices, with memorial caskets ranging from family to cats and dogs (www.amazon.com/s/ ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=casket). In this section, I turn to a brief analysis of afterlife beliefs and how they might affect and intersect with consumer choices in caskets. Finally, I will examine how these casket choices and afterlife beliefs also intersect with 385

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burial in cemeteries – since both afterlife conceptions and casket choices often intertwine with final disposal, such as the election of vault liners, or the decision to be buried directly in the earth. Since Buddhists and Hindus generally purchase urns I will not be discussing them, though one should note that Buddhists often inter the urns in a Buddhist burial ground, while Hindus actually prefer to scatter the remains in water. Cemeteries have undergone many changes in the American landscape in the last 250 years. Once occupying a privileged place in city centers, near important churches and houses of government, many cemeteries have been banished to the outskirts of city suburbs, or dug up, moved, and replaced with a contemporary landscape. Cemeteries are not merely repositories of the dead, but architectural and symbolic intersections of two worldviews – the one of the living, and the hopes and thoughts surrounding death and what death is and what it should be. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery serves to reinforce a deeper cultural message that all the dead who lose their lives in the service of nationalistic interests will be remembered as heroic. Cemeteries also map the world of the living, with religious cemeteries interring their members in sacred ground, while outsiders are buried elsewhere. Finally, cemeteries reflect class and status, with tombstones and vaults reflecting the status and material success (or lack thereof) of the person who has died. In the United States, most cemeteries are privately owned and run, which means that they have their own rules and regulations regarding burial. In burial, as in life, people often want to be buried with those they identify with – either in class, religious persuasion, or in demographics – and one of the first actions of the many diasporic groups we find in the United States is the purchase of burial ground. Thus, there are Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, Catholic, and Protestant burial grounds, along with cemeteries that specialize in ethnic subsections of these groups, like African American Protestants or Latin/x Catholics.

5.1  Jewish burial and disposal Though some cemeteries do not permit direct burial of the body, if a casket must be used, it is preferred that the casket be made of wood with no designs or metal ornamentation. Some Jewish communities contend that even metal nails or brackets may not be utilized in the construction of a casket because metal is the material for weapons of war. Similarly, the inside of the coffin must be plain and unlined with no ornamentation or decoration (Goldstein, 2015). The most popular choice in caskets for Jews remains the simple pine box, which generally varies in price from around $400–$600. Pine is considered not to be ostentatious, and because it is natural wood, will allow rapid decomposition in the ground; sometimes, breaking the box right before it is buried is done to encourage even faster decomposition of the bodily remains. Most Jews have their own cemeteries (when Jews first immigrated to the United States, it was often the first thing they bought) and still opt to be buried there. Jewish tradition claims that all should attend the interment of the body for both psychological and religious reasons. Viewing the final interment of the body is considered the final act of kindness one can perform for the deceased, since it is a kindness that cannot be reciprocated (Funeral Practices Committee, 5). Often, attendees to the burial are expected to place dirt on top of the casket if they cannot actually bury the body themselves, and this act is seen as beneficial for both the deceased and the bereaved. Last, it is not uncommon for a Jew to request that his casket be broken to speed the decomposition process, if he cannot be buried in a shroud alone. Unlike some traditions, Judaism prefers to stress the world of the living and not the dead, which generally means that a belief in dead spirits, prayers to the dead, or private conversations with the dead are strongly discouraged because they are believed to be too similar to a worship of the dead. That being said, Judaism stresses the need for a balance ‘that people should avoid 386

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the extremes of constant visitation on the one hand, and of complete disregard on the other’ (Lamm, n.d.). Thus, some visitation is permitted, particularly on days of distress, anniversaries of the death, etc., as long as these visitations do not occur on a Jewish holy day when one should instead be focused on worshipping God.

5.2  Muslim burial and disposal Muslims bury their dead in white muslin shrouds following the washing of the body, burying them directly in the ground in the cemetery. The exception to this is the Muslim martyr, who is buried directly in the ground in the clothes in which s/he was killed without being washed first. Muslim martyrs are not prepared for burial because their presence in the afterlife is assured through their sacrificial death, and therefore they do not need the same preparation for burial (remember, the preparation for burial in the Muslim worldview is for the benefit of the dead not the living). The average Muslim is washed three times by members of the same sex, in the following order: upper right side, upper left side, lower right side, lower left side. A woman’s hair is then separated and braided into three parts, and she is dressed in a sleeveless dress and veil. All bodies are shrouded in three white sheets bound by one rope at the head, two on the body, and one on the feet, and then transported to the mosque for prayers before being buried. After the community recites prayers, the body is then transported to the cemetery for burial. Generally, communities in the United States do not allow for direct burial without a casket, and thus in the United States, Muslims will purchase a simple, non-ornamental box, often purchasing them from Orthodox Jewish suppliers of death goods, who already make plain pine coffins. Because both Jews and Muslims choose to forgo embalmment, caskets are closed and simple, and made of bio-degradable materials (Malek, 2006). Muslims are generally buried in their shroud (if allowed) on their right side, perpendicular to Mecca, so that the deceased is facing Mecca. The burial itself cannot take place during sunrise, high noon, or sunset, so generally burials are held in the mid-morning or afternoon. Only men are allowed to be present at the burial itself, and after the digging of a hole of approximately 1.7 meters, the body is inserted by the male members of the deceased’s family. The ropes at the head and the feet are un-tied by the men and stones or wood (if there is no casket) are placed on top of the deceased in order to prevent direct contact with the soil that will fill the grave, being careful to keep the deceased on their right side. Practically, this also allows for the dirt to uniformly fill the grave so that it will not collapse in on the body. A small marker is placed as an identity marker and the grave is usually slightly raised above the rest of the ground so that people will not accidentally walk on the grave, but no ostentatious markers may be placed on the grave (Muslim Funeral Services, Ltd.).

5.3  Cemetery costs for Jews and Muslims The main costs for final disposal among Jews and Muslims in America, then, is the purchase and maintenance of land for body disposal. Buying cemetery land is usually one of the first major purchases of the synagogue or mosque community, though at times, some communities have chosen to purchase small plots of burial land within a larger cemetery already in use, especially if the community is small and doesn’t have access to the necessary labor required to assist in burial. Larger communities, like the Muslim and Jewish communities in New York and Washington, D.C., for example, have been able to pool their resources and purchase larger tracts of land dedicated to the exclusive use of that particular religious group (the largest Muslim cemetery in the United States is located in Virginia: see www.amaacemetery.org/; See this website for a list of 387

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Jewish American cemeteries: www.iajgsjewishcemeteryproject.org/united-states/index.html). Average costs in Muslim cemeteries for burial and maintenance vary according to land costs, but remain relatively low. Burial and maintenance for an adult Muslim in the AMAA cemetery, for example, are $1,700 for an adult, and $500 for a child. Jewish burial services vary much more in price and can be much more expensive, as Jewish families are much more dispersed than the Muslim population, but also are allowed to have more elaborate headstones and grave markers, which can elevate the price of the burial quite markedly.

5.4  Catholic and Protestant burial Catholic casket choices emphasize the notion of purgatory, a liminal state for the soul in which one’s sins can be forgiven through intercessory prayer and the recitation of the rosary. Casket choices emphasize the belief in purgatory through the inclusion of memory drawers and cap panels on caskets. Memory drawers allow for the family of the deceased to include letters, prayers, pictures, icons, prayer cards, and rosaries in a concealed drawer of the casket (although one funeral director I interviewed noted that jewelry and other personal trinkets were also frequently included as well), allowing the deceased to be buried with items meant to aide them in their journey to the afterlife. These memory drawers have been marketed in a slightly different way among Protestants, with the emphasis placed on the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) aspects of the funeral, and grieving families encouraged to place personal mementos that the deceased cherished in the drawers. Along with memory drawers, casket lid inserts and cap panels are also popular among Catholic grievers, with customizable ‘scrapbook’ style cap panels that allow for grievers to place letters, pictures, prayer cards, icon pictures, and other mementos in the cap panel of the casket. These differ slightly from the memory drawers in that they are public and on display (if the casket is open), and therefore the messages might not be as private in nature. Catholic material culture is important to these consumer death choices, as the Catholic view of the embodied sacred found in material objects means that they are much more likely to see a need to give the deceased religious objects that might help them in their afterlife.The difference here in the ways these casket add-ons are marketed between Catholics and Protestants reveals an understanding in the funeral market with the religious beliefs that drive consumer choices. The inclusion of memory drawers and cap panels also allows for the upsell of caskets, as these drive the price of the basic casket up, and are available for both wooden and metal caskets. Also popular are the customizable corner pieces and magnets added to metal caskets, allowing families to add them to the casket for the service and then remove them as mementos for the family. Many of these pieces are religious icons, but others are messages from the family to the deceased or even indications of hobbies. The most popular corner pieces are angels, praying hands, crosses, messages such as ‘Beloved Mother/Father,’ dogs, fish, or even golf clubs. Sold as a set of four, these range in price from $100–$250, and are in addition to the basic casket price. Caskets, themselves, are also indicative of religious worldviews, as metal caskets, especially those marketed as hermetically sealed, tend to be most popular with those who choose to embalm their dead out of a fear of bodily deterioration, or a desire to preserve the body because of a belief in an embodied afterlife. I would argue here that it is not merely a belief in an embodied afterlife, however, but actually an imagined embodiment that drives the consumer to choose embalmment and hermetically sealed caskets for burial. Ironically, hermetically sealed caskets increase the rate of decomposition (though many believe otherwise) because they prevent the air and water, and other natural elements from entering the coffin and the body itself is actually the center of the decomposition process. They do, however, seal any disease and contamination inside the coffin, preventing spread of disease. In the Ebola crisis of 2014, the CDC mandated 388

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that corpses that died from Ebola be buried in hermetically sealed caskets (Center for Disease Control, 2014).Thus, these caskets, like embalmment, also play on the modern fears of contamination and contagion of dead bodies, and are often marketed in the funeral home industry as the best way to preserve the body.

6  Conclusion and further questions While the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian faiths all acknowledge some form of an afterlife, only Christians sanction and accept embalmment as a regular (and even important) part of deathcare services. Hindu and Buddhist cosmologies advocate the notion of rebirth, and thus also reject embalming, viewing it as invasive, unnatural, and perhaps, even an impediment to ‘good’ karma. In comparison to other faiths, the eschatology of Christianity seems to privilege the need for the body to appear alive, even if doing so requires highly artificial and invasive means. It is no different with casket and disposal choices. Further studies, surveys, and interviews need to be conducted in this area to examine the importance, symbolism, and meaning of deathcare consumer goods on the survivors of the deceased, as well as religious communities themselves. Finally, as the green burial movement gains momentum (Hockey, Clayden & Powell), and cremation becomes a more common practice in the United States, more studies will need to be conducted on the religious significance on both individuals and communities. Key words: embalmment, vaults, funeral industry, consumer goods, afterlife, imagined embodiment, Christianity, United States, religious belief, mapping

Note 1 Parts of this chapter have previously been published in the journal Religions under Cann, C. K. (2017) ‘Buying an Afterlife: Mapping the Social Impact of Religious Beliefs through Consumer Death Goods,’ Religions, 8(9), p. 167.

Further reading Assmann, A. (2015) ‘Theories of Cultural Memory and the Concept of “Afterlife,” ’ Afterlife of Events: Perspectives on Mnemohistory. Feb 4:79–94. Assmann’s book is an important study of concepts of the afterlife and their development in culture. Belk, R. W., Wallendorf, M. and Sherry, J. F. (1989) ‘The Sacred and the Profane in Consumer Behavior: Theodicy on the Odyssey,’ Journal of Consumer Research, 16(1), pp. 1–38. This study on the relationship between religious belief and consumer behavior is a seminal article on the ways in which the material and the spiritual intersect. Dobscha, S. (2015) Death in a Consumer Culture. New York: Routledge. Dobscha’s book has pioneered the study of death goods and their relationship to consumerism and is a must-read for anyone interested in this topic. Mitford, J. (1998) The American Way of Death Revisited. New York. Alfred A. Knopf. This revision of her 1963 classic study of the American funeral industry remains the best analysis of the profit-driven nature of the death and disposal business in the United States.

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INDEX

Afghanistan 175, 362 African American 211, 386 afterlife, construction of 7 – 8, 146 – 50, 196 – 8, 280, 285; see also Garden of Eden; Gehenna; heaven; hell; paradise; purgatory; Sheol;Valhalla;Yama afterlives, wartime 5, 136 – 50; see also death, of soldiers aging 17, 86, 89, 92 – 3, 214; see also death, elderly; elderly Algeria 362 Allende, Salvador 5, 123 – 33 altar 31, 35, 154, 157 – 60, 183, 185 – 7, 243 – 4, 247, 251, 253, 257n38, 307, 309, 372 – 3 Amazon (South America) 72, 278 America: Central 8, 268; Latin 9, 384; North 9, 85, 90, 177, 225, 267, 351, 368, 373, 381, 383 – 4; South 5, 72 – 3, 123 American Civil War 379, 384 American Transhumanist Movement 279; see also avatar; transhumanism ancestors: interaction with 72 – 3, 242, 243, 302 – 6, 308 – 11; making of 97, 104 – 5, 243, 277 – 85; 293, 296, 302, 303 – 4, 306 – 7; veneration of 8, 101, 103, 106 – 7, 246, 253, 256n23, 279, 302, 307, 311 – 13, 342 – 3; world/home of 107, 293 – 4, 300, 302 – 3, 306, 308, 317, 321 angels 185, 202, 211, 329, 345, 347 – 9, 359, 373, 388 animals: dying of 7, 262 – 73; see also euthanasia, animals; sacrifice animism 317 Antyes ̣tị Sam . skāra 97, 104 – 5 Arantes, Ivone Macedo 74 Argentina 6, 43, 46, 46 – 8, 196 Ariès, Philippe 10, 11, 17, 72, 73, 75, 77, 83, 362 Arnos Vale Cemetery (AVC) 110 – 17

ashes 6, 63, 66, 74 – 5, 77, 79, 91, 96, 99 – 100, 105, 219 – 27, 297, 298, 334, 383; see also cremains; cremation; crematorium; crematory Augustine, St 232 – 7 Australia 64, 278 Austria 68 autopsy, historical 5, 123 – 33 avatar 7 – 8, 277 – 86, 297; see also American Transhumanist Movement; transhumanism Aylwin, Patricio 123 Bali 324 Barrera, Fr. Ernesto “Neto” 155 Barthes, Roland 168 Barzakh 382; see also purgatory Bazin, André 168 Becker, Ernest 13, 30 bereavement 10, 16, 17, 23, 33 – 4, 112, 117, 210, 219, 262, 315, 324; see also grief; mourning Bhagavadgīta 101 – 3, 106, 295 Bingzhongluo, China 8, 316 – 24 body 6, 10 – 17, 20, 60, 64, 68 – 9, 74, 81, 90 – 1, 97, 99, 101 – 2, 104 – 5, 110, 112 – 13, 116 – 17, 123 – 4, 126, 130 – 2, 138, 141 – 3, 154 – 9, 162 – 3, 168, 170, 197 – 205, 226, 232 – 4, 237, 241, 250, 271 – 2, 279 – 81, 283 – 4, 286, 287n13, 294, 296, 299 – 300, 303, 305 – 8, 321 – 2, 327, 333 – 4, 336 – 8, 346 – 7, 349 – 51, 356, 360, 362 – 3, 366 – 72, 374 – 5, 377 – 89; see also cadaver; corpse Borges, Jorge Luis 129 – 30 Bosnia 362 Bowersock, G.W. 232, 236 Bowlby, John 31, 34 brain death: ethics of 3, 20 – 7, 90; whole-brain death 20; see also death; dying, ethics of Brazil 4, 9, 72 – 83, 366 – 75

393

Index breaking bonds 4, 30, 93, 241, 296, 300 Bristol, England 110 – 11, 113; see also England Britain see Great Britain Brusilov, Alexei 138 – 9 Bucharest, Romania 60 – 9; see also Romania Buddha 224 – 6, 320 Buddhism 381, 383 – 4, 386, 389: Chinese 317, 320; Nu 317 – 20, 322; Tibetan 316 – 23;Vietnamese 7; Japanese 90 Buffalo Thorn tree 302, 304 – 5 burial: Brazilian 73 – 4, 79, 83, 366 – 73; Buddhist 317 – 18, 383, 386; Catholic 64, 323, 386, 388 – 90; early Christian 237; earth 4, 114 – 16, 379, 12, 13, 15 – 17, 64; future of 111 – 12, 114 – 17, 118n6; green 13, 113, 389; grounds 279, 284, 286, 305, 307 – 8, 370, 386; Hindu 96, 99, 383; Inka 43, 45, 54 – 55; Japanese 89; Jewish 8, 343, 351 – 2, 382, 386 – 8; mound 141, 242, 333, 334 – 9; Muslim 8, 98, 358, 362 – 3, 382, 386 – 8; Netherlands 220 – 1, 224; Orthodox Christian 4, 64 – 6; pet 272; photography of 168 – 70, 373; plot (site) 11, 118n6, 305, 322 – 3, 371, 378, 387; pods 13; Protestant Christian 384, 386, 388 – 90; secular 73; societies 351 – 2; Soviet 137, 139 – 43, 146 – 7, 149 – 50; two-stage 278 – 9, 307, 343; United States 15 – 17, 386; urn 54;Vietnamese 245, 248, 250, 252;Viking 8, 327 – 39; water 117, 317 – 18, 327 – 9; Zulu 302 – 7, 313; see also dead, disposal of; funeral cadaver 22, 154 – 5, 163, 203, 371; see also body; corpse Calchaquí Valley, Argentina 43, 46 – 8; see also Argentina California 15, 21 – 6, 378; see also United States camera 9, 129, 131, 168 – 9, 171, 173, 175, 177, 180n1, 181n9, 366 – 8, 370, 372 – 3, 375; see also burial, photography of; photography Canada 64, 378 cancer 11, 21, 90, 169, 175 – 6, 220 – 1 candles 9, 247, 322, 351 – 2, 366 – 8, 370 – 2 Cann, Candi 14, 219, 225 – 6, 315, 379 car decal memorial see memorial, car decal cardiac death 20, 25 – 6; see also death Caroni River, Trinidad 99 – 100, 104 – 5; see also Trinidad casket 10 – 11, 13, 15, 17, 116, 124, 142, 322, 337, 370, 377 – 80, 385 – 9; see also coffin cat 7, 262 – 3, 266 – 7, 269, 271 – 2; see also pet loss; revenant pets Catholic 15, 21, 63 – 6, 68, 72 – 4, 77, 160, 161, 183, 186, 188 – 9, 190n7, 196, 209, 235, 316 – 23, 325n12, 373, 381, 384, 386, 388; see also Jesuit; priest, Catholic Caura, Trinidad 105; see also Trinidad Cavell, Stanley 169, 171 – 2, 176 – 80, 181n9

cemetery 5, 10 – 11, 16, 50 – 1, 60, 66, 73, 82, 99, 110 – 18, 118n6, 118n9, 119n12, 119n13, 139, 203 – 4, 331 – 3, 337, 370 – 1, 385 – 8 Cenuşa crematorium 61 – 2, 64, 66 – 8; see also crematorium; crematory children: burial sites of 50 – 1, 388; death of 11, 21, 61, 143, 174, 246, 345, 373; grief in 6, 208, 210 – 16; ideas of death for 4, 6, 13, 15, 31, 52, 195 – 205, 296, 310 Chile 5, 123 – 33 China 114, 247, 255n11, 256n28, 257n39, 315 – 19, 325n10, 325n11, 325n12; see also Buddhism, Chinese Christianity, early 7, 187, 231 – 7 coffin 9, 13, 74, 99, 141, 204, 223, 244 – 5, 304, 306, 308, 321 – 3, 351, 366 – 71, 373 – 4, 375n2, 385 – 8; see also casket cognitive development 199, 203 Colorado 15; see also United States commemoration 139, 144 – 5, 221, 296 continuing bonds 6 – 7, 9n3, 34, 36, 37, 219 – 20, 223, 225, 227, 242, 263 corpse 4 – 6, 8 – 9, 13, 65, 74, 99, 116, 123, 125 – 33, 138, 140, 143, 145, 148, 153 – 6, 158, 162, 170, 174, 202, 237, 241 – 2, 244 – 5, 253 – 4, 256n27, 266, 296, 299 – 300, 304, 306, 322, 333, 334, 336, 357, 362 – 3, 371 – 2, 378 – 81, 384 – 5, 389; see also cadaver; corpse corpse ritual 8, 299 – 300 cosmology 8, 269, 272, 277, 282, 285, 302 – 4, 310, 359, 382, 389; see also heaven; hell Council of Hertford 232 Council of Toledo 232 cremains 6 – 7, 10, 13, 111, 219, 224 – 6; see also ashes; cremation; crematorium; crematory; funeral pyre cremation: attitudes towards 4, 12 – 17, 60 – 9, 75, 115 – 16, 303, 358; Brazilian 4, 73 – 7, 367 – 8; Buddhist 383; Catholic 15; Cremation Ordinance 96; Dutch 6, 219 – 26; Hindu 4, 96 – 101, 102, 104 – 6, 108, 293, 296, 383; of pets 265; Romanian 4, 60 – 9; in the United States 10, 12 – 17, 378, 379 – 80, 389;Viking 327 – 8, 333 – 6; see also ashes; cremains; crematorium; crematory; dead, disposal of; funeral pyre crematorium 61 – 4, 66 – 8, 72, 74 – 7, 79, 83, 96, 100, 221, 367, 383; see also ashes; cremains; crematory; funeral pyre crematory 4, 75, 79, 383; see also ashes; cremains; crematorium; funeral pyre Cyprian 233 Czech Republic 64 dasgātra 104 – 5 Davies, Douglas 263 dead, disposal of 4 – 6, 8 – 10, 12, 14, 69, 72, 79, 83, 96, 98, 100, 110, 112 – 14, 117 – 18, 219, 221, 223 – 6, 256n27, 366 – 71, 377, 380 – 4, 386 – 9; see also burial; cremation; funeral

394

Index death: active 143, 148; animal/pet 7, 262 – 73; denying of 13 – 14, 16, 23, 30 – 3, 203, 344, 368; dying of diagnosis (terminal) 17, 21 – 2, 31, 85, 90, 175, 211; elderly 15, 17, 86, 88 – 93, 210; frontline 136 – 41, 144 – 50; (on the) internet (online) 7, 9, 16, 86 – 7, 114, 115, 220, 262 – 73, 367, 373; living 10 – 12; medicalized 10, 32, 272, 379, 381, 385; military 5, 136 – 50, 385; parental 6, 88, 208 – 16, 220 – 1, 226 – 7, 241, 244 – 5, 248, 296, 317; public 5, 7, 9, 11, 73, 80, 82 – 3, 99, 102, 107, 123 – 5, 139, 162 – 3, 222, 225, 227, 232, 324, 327, 367, 373 – 4, 379, 388; social 12, 14, 329; of soldiers 5, 107, 136 – 50, 175, 346, 379, 386; solitary (kodokushi) 4, 85 – 9, 92 – 3, 338; suffering in 27, 86 – 7, 90, 144, 155, 157, 168 – 9, 171 – 6, 180, 211 – 12, 231 – 5, 248, 250 – 2, 271 – 2; violent 5, 139, 240 – 3, 255n22, 256n27, 363, 375n1; see also brain death; cardiac death death certificate 100, 382 deceased 7, 8, 9n3, 11, 13, 14, 16 – 17, 30, 33 – 4, 36 – 7, 45 – 6, 50, 55 – 6, 61, 63, 65, 69, 72, 74, 77, 86, 91, 97, 99, 102, 104 – 7, 116 – 18, 125 – 6, 140, 142, 146 – 7, 179, 187, 212, 214, 216, 220, 223, 225 – 6, 242 – 6, 263, 268, 271 – 2, 277 – 9, 284, 302, 304 – 9, 316, 320 – 2, 324, 328 – 30, 333 – 6, 338 – 9, 342 – 3, 347 – 9, 351 – 2, 352n7, 356 – 9, 362 – 4, 366 – 75, 378 – 84, 386 – 9 deity 7, 101, 106, 107, 244, 253, 256n27, 295, 297 – 9, 345 Denmark 64, 114, 118n7, 330, 337 desaparecidos (the disappeared) 124, 130, 132, 133n4 Dharma 97 – 8, 100, 107, 296, 298 director, funeral 12, 226, 367 – 8, 371, 378 – 9, 381, 385, 388; see also National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA) disease 11 – 12, 32, 56, 99, 175 – 6, 205, 240, 312 – 13, 316, 318, 362, 369, 381, 388; see also illness disruptive dead 240, 244 – 5, 253, 279; see also ghosts, malevolent Dīvalī 107 dog 77, 266 – 72, 296, 298, 329 – 30, 337, 385, 388; see also pet loss; revenant pets Doka, Ken 3 – 4, 34 – 6 Donatism 233, 235 dualism 118, 293, 297, 345 dual-process model see Stroebe and Schut’s dual-process model dying, ethics of 3, 7, 12, 23, 25, 85, 168 – 9, 173, 237; see also brain death, ethics of

England 110, 183 – 9, 266, 367; see also United Kingdom; Great Britain ethics see brain death, ethics of; dying, ethics of Europe 64, 69, 72 – 3, 83, 85, 178, 184, 219, 231, 313, 327, 351, 384 euthanasia: animal 263, 265 – 6, 270 – 2; human 16 – 17, 63, 85 Evangelicalism 21, 209, 384 – 5; see also Protestantism; reformers, Protestant Facebook 16 – 17, 115, 373 – 4; see also death, (on the) internet; Instagram; internet; suicide, internet groups family 4, 5, 8, 11 – 12, 14 – 15, 21 – 4, 26, 27n2, 27n6, 31 – 3, 60 – 2, 66, 73, 75, 77, 79 – 82, 85 – 93, 99, 101 – 7, 114, 116, 137 – 8, 141 – 2, 147 – 9, 161 – 2, 170, 180n4, 184, 196, 200 – 1, 204, 210 – 11, 222 – 4, 241 – 3, 245 – 7, 250, 253, 256n23, 263 – 4, 266, 268, 271 – 2, 278, 283, 300, 304 – 6, 308, 311, 317, 320 – 3, 343, 350 – 1, 357 – 9, 363 – 4, 366, 368 – 75, 379 – 80, 383, 385, 387 – 8; see also father loss; kinship; mother loss Farman, Abou 277, 281, 283 – 6, 287n8, 287n13 Farrell, James 10 father loss 170, 210 – 13, 215 – 16, 220, 224 – 6, 256n27, 279, 285; see also family; mother loss feasting, burial 8, 105 – 6, 256n29, 322 – 3, 327 – 33, 335 – 9, 340n3 France 64, 79, 222 Freud, Sigmund 30 – 1, 35 – 7 funeral 5 – 6, 8 – 17, 33, 55, 60, 63 – 6, 68 – 9, 74, 83, 88 – 91, 104, 111, 115, 117, 131, 137 – 41, 145 – 6, 149, 154 – 6, 158 – 9, 161 – 3, 165n10, 169, 171, 219 – 21, 223 – 7, 242, 248, 250, 256n24, 265, 293, 296, 298, 300, 304 – 6, 308, 315, 317, 320 – 3, 325n9, 327 – 33, 336, 351, 358 – 9, 362 – 4, 367 – 74, 377 – 89; see also burial funeral home 6, 11, 14, 15, 17, 74, 156, 169, 171, 367, 373, 377 – 81, 385, 389 funeral pyre 99, 104, 298, 300, 333, 336, 383; see also cremation Future Cemetery project 5, 110 – 18, 118n9, 119n12, 119n13 Gangadhara festival 107 Garden of Eden 347 – 50, 352, 363; see also afterlife, construction of; heaven; paradise Garuḍapurān ̣a 96, 100, 103, 106, 108n2, 296 Gehenna 345 – 51, 352n6; see also afterlife, construction of; hell; purgatory Germany 22 ghostly realm 243 – 4, 299; see also spirit world ghosts 7 – 8, 104, 153, 202, 240, 247 – 8, 250, 252 – 4, 254n1, 255n13, 255n21, 255n22, 255n23, 255n25, 256n28, 257n40, 257n41, 295 – 6, 300, 306 – 7, 336, 340n5: animal 7, 262 – 4, 266 – 9, 272, 274n1, 274n9; malevolent 7 – 8, 240 – 7, 252, 256n27, 279, 296, 383; see also disruptive dead; spirit

Egypt 22, 26, 30, 324, 379 elderly 15, 17, 86, 88 – 9, 91 – 3, 210, 270, 272, 274n4, 320; see also aging; death, elderly El Salvador 5, 153 – 5, 157 – 8, 160, 163 – 4, 166n36 embalmment 11, 13, 138, 168, 362, 367, 377, 378 – 85, 387 – 9 end-of-life (EOL) care 15, 89 – 90

395

Index Grande, Rutilio, S.J. 158 – 9, 161 – 2, 164 gravesite 4, 11, 15, 99, 118n6, 323, 358, 361; see also burial, plot (site) Great Britain 14, 361; see also England; United Kingdom grief 3, 5 – 7, 9, 9n3, 14, 16 – 17, 30 – 8, 75, 83, 102, 144, 148, 170, 196, 219 – 21, 226, 242, 263 – 4, 266 – 7, 284, 315, 385: disenfranchised 35, 263; dual-process model 3, 36 – 7; stages of 30 – 2; task model 3, 34, 36 – 7; theory of 31 – 2, 34; see also bereavement; mourning

Islam 8, 99, 319, 333, 356 – 64, 381 – 3; see also Muslim; Shi’ite isolation, social 149, 176, 178, 180 Israel 21, 114, 342 – 3, 352n3

haunting 8, 172, 174, 236, 240, 243 – 5, 255n21, 264, 266 – 7, 274n1, 296, 304, 324, 336 – 7, 383 heaven 7, 13, 91, 144; children’s notions of 200 – 4; Christian 211, 234; Hindu 104, 293 – 4, 296 – 300; Jewish 343, 347, 350; Muslim 359 – 60, 362, 364;Vietnamese 243, 250, 252 – 3, 256n26; Viking 336; see also afterlife, construction of; Garden of Eden; paradise;Valhalla hell 7, 103, 105, 204, 253, 296, 300, 357, 360 – 1, 363 – 4; see also afterlife, construction of; Gehenna; purgatory Hinduism 8, 96 – 108, 293 – 300 hospitality 8, 45, 47 – 8, 54, 105, 294, 328 Hungary 61, 68 hydrolysis, alkaline 13 hygiene 61, 362 Ica Valley, Peru 43, 46, 52 – 7; see also Peru iconoclasm 183 – 4, 189 Idaho 378; see also United States Ignatius 232 – 3, 235 – 6 illness 10 – 12, 17, 24, 31, 242, 273, 317, 320; mental 316; terminal 17, 25, 36, 85, 90, 169 – 70, 176, 198, 211, 222, 246; see also disease images 6, 123 – 8, 130 – 1, 155, 157, 168 – 80, 180n1, 180n2, 181n8, 181n9, 183 – 9, 200, 205, 236, 246 – 7, 272, 294, 297 – 300, 335, 342 – 3, 350, 352, 357 – 8, 363, 372, 373 immortality 16, 30, 97, 102, 138, 142, 255n13, 268, 277 – 86, 287n8, 287n13, 293 – 4, 299 – 300, 343 – 4, 346, 361, 385 India 72, 96 – 100, 102, 107, 108n1, 279 – 80, 293, 296, 298 – 9, 316, 362, 383 Indonesia 114 informed consent 85, 89 – 90 Inka: empire of 4, 43 – 57; migration of 43, 56; mortuary ceramics of 45 – 8, 50 – 4; mortuary rituals of 43, 45 – 6, 48, 51 – 3, 55 – 7; politics of 43 – 6, 48, 51 – 3, 55 – 7; tombs 5, 43, 46, 48, 50 – 7 Instagram 373; see also death, (on the) internet; internet; suicide, internet groups internet 7, 9, 16, 86 – 7, 262, 272, 373, 377, 385; see also death, (on the) internet; Facebook; Instagram; suicide, internet groups Iran 22, 362

Japan 4, 11, 22, 64, 85 – 93, 257n40 Japan Organ Transplant Network 90 Jesuit 153, 157, 163, 165n2, 165n15; see also burial, Catholic; Catholic; priest, Catholic Jesus Christ, death of 6, 64, 130, 183 – 7, 189; see also Passion of Christ Joralemon, Donald 3 – 4, 14 Jordan 362 Judaism 8, 21, 24, 209, 286, 342 – 52, 381 – 3, 386 – 9 judgment: Christian 138, 155, 164, 188, 232; Jewish 344 – 7, 352n7; Muslim 8, 356 – 7, 359, 361, 363 – 4, 382, 383 Kabbalah 348 – 50; see also Judaism Kaddish 351; see also mourning, Jewish Kali 298 – 300 Kansas 378; see also United States karma 97, 274n10, 294 – 6, 299 – 300, 389; see also Hinduism kinship 9, 50, 102, 266, 277 – 8, 280 – 2, 285, 318, 320, 323; see also family Kirov, Sergei 139 kodokushi see death, solitary Korea 64 Korean War 127 Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth 3, 12, 14, 31 – 4; stage theory of 3, 12, 14, 31 – 4 Kuwait 362 Larraín, Pablo 124, 127, 130 – 1, 133, 133n4 Leibovitz, Annie 168 – 71, 176, 180n2 Lenin,Vladimir 138 – 9, 142 LGBT community, death in 4, 80 – 1 liberation 8, 97, 158, 163, 286, 293 – 5, 298, 300 liminality 328, 333 – 4, 336, 338 Lindemann, Erich 31, 35 living dead 302, 304 – 6, 309 – 12, 314 living will 4, 85, 90 Locumba Valley, Peru 43, 46, 48 Mahabharata 295 Maimonides 349 – 50 martyrdom 5 – 7, 129 – 30, 144, 153 – 5, 158 – 60, 162 – 4, 232 – 6, 253, 256n28, 345 – 6, 360, 387; female martyrs 7, 143, 232, 240 – 3, 247 – 52; suicide 7, 240 – 3, 247 – 53, 257n29, 257n42; voluntary 7, 234 – 5, 237 Mayo, Andréa de 79, 82 – 3 meaning reconstruction 3, 35 – 7 medicalized death see death, medicalized memorial 4 – 5, 14 – 15, 48, 51 – 2, 106, 113 – 18, 131, 140, 153 – 5, 157, 165, 169 – 70, 219, 221:

396

Index car decal 14, 17; gardens 77, 79; home 220; practices 79 – 82, 106, 223, 225 – 6, 243, 247, 249, 333, 352, 361, 385; roadside 10, 14, 16 – 17; service 65, 68, 91, 155, 161, 322, 325n10, 351, 367, 383; tattoo 6, 14, 221, 225 – 6 Mexico 22 Minnesota 378; see also United States Mitford, Jessica 13, 381 monk, Buddhist 317, 320 – 3, 325n9 Montana 15; see also United States Morocco 362 mortuary practices: Brazilian 373 – 4; Hindu 4, 96, 101 – 4; Inka 43, 45 – 6, 51 – 2, 55 – 7; Jewish 342 – 4, 350;Vietnamese 248, 256n24;Viking 327 – 39; Zulu 303 – 4 Moscow, Russia 61; see also Russia mother loss 31, 79, 90, 170 – 1, 210 – 11, 215 – 16, 220 – 4, 250, 321; see also family; father loss mourning: Brazilian 369 – 72; Christianity 384; Dutch 6, 219 – 21, 226; Hindu 96, 101 – 2, 296; Jewish 343, 347, 351; and meaning construction 5; Muslim 383; pet loss 262, 266, 268; process 30 – 1, 35, 211; public 14, 17, 158, 161 – 2, 322 – 3; Soviet 5, 136 – 50;Viking 334; see also bereavement; grief Muñoz, Marlise 20 – 1, 26 Muslim 8, 98, 296, 317, 324, 327, 356 – 64, 382 – 3, 386 – 9; see also Islam; Shi’ite

Paris, France 111, 232; see also France Passion of Christ 6, 183 – 6, 235 – 6; see also Jesus Christ, death of Peru 43, 46, 48 – 55 pet loss 7, 262 – 4, 266, 268, 272; see also revenant pet photography: post-mortem 6, 125, 127, 168 – 80, 372 – 4; see also burial, photography of; camera Pinochet, General Augusto 123 – 4, 128 – 9, 133 Pitr ̣paks ̣a 103, 106 – 7 prayer 6, 8, 65, 103, 105 – 6, 138, 153, 156, 159, 162, 183 – 5, 187 – 8, 189n1, 190n10, 209 – 10, 213 – 16, 249 – 50, 257n33, 297, 308, 343, 351 – 2, 357, 359, 361 – 4, 369 – 72, 374 – 5, 382 – 4, 386 – 8 priest, Catholic 5, 153 – 63, 165n2, 189, 323, 369; see also Catholic Protestantism 6, 8, 74, 183, 186 – 9, 190n7, 209, 316 – 23, 324n6, 325n12, 381, 384 – 6, 388; see also Evangelicalism; reformers, Protestant purgatory 189n1, 253, 363, 382, 384, 388; see also Barzakh; Gehenna Quinlan, Karen 10 Qur’an 356 – 63, 382 Rāmāyan ̣a 101 – 3, 108n1, 295 Rawski, Evelyn 315 rebirth 8, 97, 211, 256n26, 279, 293 – 5, 297 – 8, 329 – 30, 383, 389 reciprocity 141, 269, 279 Red Army 5, 136 – 50, 175; see also Russia; Soviet Union re-death 293 reddit.com 262, 267 – 72, 274n11 Reformation, English 6, 183 – 9; see also reformers, Protestant reformers, Protestant 183, 186 – 9; see also Evangelicalism; Protestantism reincarnation 8, 13, 97, 197, 281, 293 – 5, 298, 322, 350, 382 religious behavior 209, 213 – 14, 374 religious belief 4 – 5, 9, 21 – 7, 154, 183, 188 – 9, 197, 200, 205, 209, 211 – 13, 274n5, 283, 315, 385, 388 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) 21, 24 – 7, 27n4 Resurrection, doctrine of 8, 15, 64, 184 – 6, 189, 232 – 3, 343 – 9, 352, 352n4, 352n7, 356 – 7, 361, 363, 382 revenant pets 7, 262 – 73; see also pet loss Romania 4, 60 – 9 Romanian Cremation Association 60, 68 Romanian Orthodox Church 4, 60 – 9; see also Orthodox Christian Romero, Óscar: beatification of 154, 157, 160, 163 – 4; death of 153 – 5, 157 – 8, 160 – 5; sermons of 5, 154 – 64

National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA) 12; see also director, funeral National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health 212 Navarro, Alfonso 156, 165n7, 165n10 Neimeyer 3, 35 – 7 Néris, Edson 79 – 81 Netherlands 6, 37, 68, 219 – 27 Neves, Tancredo 73 New Jersey 20 – 5, 378; see also United States New York 11, 21 – 3, 25, 387; see also United States Nicolaescu, Sergiu 60, 62, 64, 68 Nigeria 22 Norway 22, 330, 333 Oregon 15; see also United States organ donation 4, 20, 22, 23, 25 – 6, 27n5, 89 – 90, 112, 198, 380 Orthodox Christian 138 – 9, 143, 150, 381; see also Romanian Orthodox Church Ortiz, Fr. Octavio 156, 161 Pakistan 361 – 2 Panama 127 paradise 204, 299, 333, 335 – 6, 345 – 7, 349, 356 – 7, 360 – 1, 363 – 4; see also Garden of Eden; heaven paraloka vidya 296 paranormal 7, 262 – 9

397

Index Rothblatt, Martine 280, 283 Russia 5, 63, 114, 138, 143 – 4, 327, 339n1; see also Red Army; Soviet Union sacrifice 97, 104 – 5, 129 – 30, 138, 142 – 4, 146, 149, 161, 164 – 5, 185 – 6, 235 – 6, 244 – 5, 255n22, 256n27, 279, 293 – 5, 306, 327, 329 – 31, 340n4, 345, 387 samsara 8, 256n26, 294 – 5, 297, 300 Sanatan Dharma Association 98, 100 Sanders, Catherine 32 – 4, 36, 226; phase theory of 32 – 4, 36 Sangoma 308, 311 – 13 Sanitary Reformation 368, 371, 374 San Salvador, El Salvador 153, 158 – 9, 162; see also El Salvador Sant’Ana, Flavio 79, 81 Santiago, Chile 123 – 4, 127 – 8; see also Chile São João del Ray, Brazil 73; see also Brazil São Paulo, Brazil 72 – 5, 79 – 83, 369; see also Brazil São Paulo Public Crematorium 74 satsangas 102 Saudi Arabia 362 Scandinavia 8, 327, 329 – 30, 336, 339n1 Schut see Stroebe and Shut’s dual-process model secularization 15 – 16, 22, 63, 65, 68 – 9, 72 – 3, 75, 77, 83, 115, 219 – 21, 266, 277 – 8, 285 – 6, 287n12, 287n13, 307, 322, 348, 377 Serbia 61, 63 – 4 shamans 8, 279, 317 Sheol 343 – 6, 352, 382; see also afterlife, construction of; Gehenna; hell; purgatory Shi’ite 361 – 2; see also Islam; Muslim Shiva 107, 297 – 300, 351 shroud, burial 13, 351, 363, 370, 372, 382, 386 – 7 slave 73, 97, 234, 237, 318, 329, 334 – 6, 370 Slovenia 64 Smith, Jonathan Z. 246, 253 Sobrino, Jon 163 social death see death, social Social Initiative Avatar project (2045) 279 social isolation see isolation, social society 4 – 8, 13 – 17, 45, 51 – 4, 61 – 7, 69, 72 – 3, 75, 82 – 3, 85 – 6, 88 – 9, 91 – 3, 98, 101 – 2, 106 – 7, 114, 164 – 5, 174, 221, 234, 240, 245 – 6, 252, 278, 285, 311, 313, 315 – 16, 319, 321, 323 – 4, 329, 334 – 5, 351, 368, 374, 378; collective 52, 86; individualistic 85 – 6, 89, 91 – 2 Society Cenuşa 61 – 2, 64, 66 – 8 soldiers, death of see death, of soldiers solitary death see death, solitary Sontag, Susan 6, 168 – 80 sora 278 soul 16, 30, 64 – 5, 79, 97, 99, 101 – 7, 138, 183 – 4, 187 – 8, 197, 200 – 4, 233 – 4, 243, 246 – 7, 249, 256n26, 262, 277 – 8, 283, 287n13, 293 – 9, 317, 321 – 2, 333 – 7, 343 – 4, 346 – 51, 352n6, 352n7, 356 – 61, 363, 369, 371 – 2, 383 – 4, 388

398

South Africa 8, 15, 302, 308, 311 – 13 Soviet Union 5, 148; see also Red Army; Russia Spain 68 Spanish Civil War 174 spectacle 6, 9, 124 – 5, 232 – 3 spirits 6 – 8, 31, 102, 105 – 7, 140, 155, 202 – 3, 212, 240 – 50, 252 – 4, 255n11, 255n22, 256n23, 256n25, 256n26, 256n27, 257n41, 262, 264, 269, 278 – 9, 283, 296, 300, 303 – 9, 312, 317, 322, 324n4, 333, 335, 336, 338, 346 – 7, 350, 352n7, 356, 359, 372, 386; see also ghost spirit world 240; see also ghostly realm Stalingrad, Soviet Union 140, 144; see also Soviet Union Stroebe and Schut’s dual-process model 3, 37 Suffolk, England 183; see also England suicide: in Christianity 7, 69, 231 – 7; in Hinduism 296; in Islam 360; in Japan 4, 86 – 7; internet groups 4, 86 – 7; physician assisted 15 – 16; Salvador Allende 123 – 4, 126 – 9, 132; in Vietnam 240 – 54 suicide martyrs see martyrdom, suicide Sunni 361 – 2 Sweden 64, 334 Switzerland 14, 64, 318 Sylvan Constellation 5, 116 – 17 Talqeen 363 Tanak 342 – 6; Old Testament 186 Tantra 299 – 300 tattoo memorial see memorial, tattoo technology 5, 7, 21, 25, 32, 110 – 12, 117, 125, 277, 280 – 1, 283 – 6, 287n12, 340n2, 369, 374 – 5 Tertullian 232 – 3, 235 Texas 20, 27; see also United States thanatology 3 – 4, 7 – 9, 14 – 16, 125, 134n7 Tibet 8, 315 – 19, 322 Tokyo, Japan 87, 90, 92; see also Japan transcendence 266 – 7, 282, 284, 298 transhumanism 7 – 8, 277, 281 – 2, 285, 287n12; see also American Transhumanist Movement transmissions of marvels (truyền kỳ) 7, 240, 248, 254n2, 254n13, 257n42 Trinidad 4 – 5, 96 – 108, 108n1, 108n4, 108n5, 108n7 troops, deaths of see death, of soldiers Troyer, John 5, 113, 219 truyền kỳ see transmissions of marvels tsunami 88, 92 Ukraine 63, 333 umbilical cord 307 – 8 Underwood, Charles 111 United Kingdom 5 – 6, 26, 64, 110 – 11, 114, 219, 366 – 7; see also England; Great Britain United States 3 – 4, 6, 9, 9n2, 10 – 17, 20 – 7, 64, 79, 87, 89 – 91, 113 – 14, 171, 209, 212 – 13, 219, 225, 277, 318, 367, 373, 377 – 80, 383 – 4, 386 – 7, 389

Index Upanishads 108n6, 293 – 5 urn 6, 54, 75, 222, 224 – 6, 377, 386

washing, ritual 8, 299, 304, 351, 357, 362 – 4, 367, 380 – 3, 387 Washington (state) 15; see also United States Washington DC 387; see also United States water burial see burial, water Watson, James 315 Weller, Robert 316 widow 33, 37, 263, 265, 270 women, death of 7, 20, 31, 79, 86 – 7, 90 – 1, 138, 143, 145 – 6, 149, 170 – 1, 210 – 11, 215 – 16, 220 – 4, 232, 234, 240 – 4, 247 – 52, 296, 315, 321, 329, 335, 337, 382; see also martyrdom, female martyrs; mother loss Worden, J. William 34, 36 – 7; task model of 3, 34 – 7 World War I 61, 175 World War II 61, 65, 73, 89

Valhalla 330, 335 – 6, 339; see also afterlife, construction of Van Gennep, Arnold 327 – 9, 334 – 9 velório 366 – 75 Vermont 15; see also United States veterans 136 – 7, 145 – 6, 175 Vietnam 7, 127, 171, 240 – 54, 255n20, 255n21, 255n27, 256 – 7n29, 383 Vietnam War 127, 171 viewing 11, 99, 366 – 7, 378 – 83, 389; see also visitations, from the dead Viking 8, 327 – 39, 339n1, 340n2 Viking Age 327 – 8, 330, 334, 336 – 7, 339, 340n2 Virgin Mary 6, 183 – 4, 187 – 9 visitations, from the dead 106, 262 – 72, 274n3, 274n10; to the dead 6, 358, 361, 366 – 7, 378 – 9, 382 – 3, 387 Volga River 327 – 8, 333 – 4

Yama 8, 104 – 6, 293 – 4, 296 – 7; afterlife 4, 6 – 9, 13, 30, 51, 97, 99, 103 – 5, 138 – 9, 145, 150, 168, 180, 184, 188, 195, 198, 205, 211, 253 – 4, 262 – 3, 276, 279, 282 Yemen 362 Ynglinga saga 336, 336 Yunnan 315 – 16, 319

wake: center 74, 367 – 8, 370, 372 – 3; virtual 9, 366 – 7, 373 – 5 Walter, Tony 17, 137, 144, 150, 273, 315 wartime afterlives see afterlives, wartime

Zulu 8, 302 – 14

399