The View from the West: Reading the Anthropology of Non-western Death Ritual

Abstract

This chapter raises questions about the way in which accounts of death ritual, enacted at other times and in other places, have been constructed and made use of within frames of reference specific to western discourses. Its focus is the descriptions and discussions of funerary practices initially generated by social historians and anthropologists which have subsequently been drawn upon by psychiatrists and counsellors involved in the management of death within contemporary western societies — an involvement which may be either practical, academic or some combination of the two. Thus, for example, Riley, a bereaved parent and student of child development, states in an article entitled ‘The Psychology of Bereavement: a Personal View’:

… it is felt that old customs and other cultures help the bereaved at this second stage of mourning. The traditional black clothing enables the mourner to give the dead person a central place in her life as before … while it would appear to the modern view that it is false to impose customs on such an intense and private emotion as grief, the very loneliness of the crisis and the bewildering conflict of feelings cries out for a supportive structure.

(Riley 1984: 180)