An anthropology of death

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, Dec, 2005 by Tim Batchelder

In the developed world the "life" of almost any individual body can be extended, the dying process prolonged. But increasingly the white body is cared for by the labor of many black and brown bodies, people who themselves lack health insurance. In his recent book, Pathologies of Power, physician-anthropologist Paul Farmer reflected on the contrasting deliberations about technologies that stave off death in his two clinical homes, rural Haiti versus a Harvard teaching hospital.

Rituals of Death

Today's technoscience is only one of many religions practiced over thousands of years of human culture to improve the experience of death. Ceremonial burials have been discovered going back tens of thousands of years in which people were buried with pots, flowers, and tools, for the first time showing the attraction of the idea of an extension of life beyond the physical. In general, the world's religions emphasize that death is not so bad and actually can be a lot better than life. In Christianity as the most widespread religion in the world there is little cultural component but overall death is considered part of God's plan. In Judaism all death is considered part of a divine plan and the deceased are heavily ritualized including a vigil kept over the body from death to burial, which must be done immediately with no embalming and no cremation and some part of the body touching the earth. After burial friends and family spend from between a week to a year (for the offspring) mourning, which consists of sitting together, praying, abstaining from work, pleasure, and grooming, refraining from cutting their hair, attending celebrations, and listening to music. In this way respect for the dead is demonstrated and participated in. In Buddhism birth, aging, and death are all "dukkha," which can be translated as stress, frustration, or suffering. Thus, death is considered to be no worse than life and dead souls are reincarnated into new bodies, the type of body depending on what you did in your past life. You can escape the cycle of birth and death through enlightenment. Like Judaism, death in Islam is considered to be the will of the supreme deity and not a tragedy. But unlike in Judaism, grieving is not emphasized (no tearing clothes, mourning attire, or wailing which happened a lot before Islam in the Middle East.) However the wife must mourn for just over 4 months and can't wear makeup, remarry, or wear fancy clothes for this period. Death is a journey not a destruction. Hindus, much like Buddhists, believe that souls are reincarnated into new bodies and that the ultimate goal of existence is exit from the cycle of birth and death. Exit from the cycle is seen as oneness with the universal soul, called Atman. Serious illness requires the presence of the family and friends who chant and sing and the body is cremated since this is the quickest way to send the soul to the next life. If humans have so long realized that the spirit lives on after physical death, and this existence is often superior, why do we spend so much time and effort to prolong our physical lives? Frazer, a noted anthropologist, traces this to the common notion of contagion in which two things once in contact continue to affect each other. Thus humans retain their concern over the physical body out of fear that its decline will affect the spirit. This explains many death rituals including burials with cosmetic treatments. Likewise, the dead continue to influence the living so we must take care of the corpse in order to avoid antagonizing the spirits. The principle of similarity states that like produces like and thus the dead being is felt to contain the essence of death and must be treated with care.