Abstract
Personhood does not always end with death. This chapter explores cross-cultural variations in the extent to which both the living and the dead are understood to be persons and the agency of the dead themselves in the lives of the living. Under consideration here are how cross-cultural practices of grieving, mourning, disposal of the corpse, and memorialising help to illuminate understandings of personhood. As well as examining how death is often perceived as a long process of transition from one form of personhood to another and not a sudden event, this chapter also contemplates how social relations in a number of cultural setting continue after death. In so doing, the certitude of Western linear models of development and of the life course is further problematised.
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Notes
- 1.
Note that although Sora are described as a “tribal” group, this kind of transition from “experience” to “ ancestor” has strong parallels with the wider Hindu transition from unstable and unpredictable “ghost” to stable “ ancestor” reflected in the lengthy set of Hindu funeral rites; my thanks to Peter Phillimore for making me aware of this.
- 2.
Such observations of how cultural practices around death might be shifting in the face of profound global socio-cultural change—due to factors such as post-colonialism, emergent new technologies, and increasing levels of migration—have recently been explored in an edited volume focused specifically on this by Boret et al. (2017), offering a number of compelling ethnographic examples.
- 3.
See also the excellent ethnographic film by Martin Gruber set in Kensal Green Cemetery, London about the workers and visitors at this cemetery: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8c5s3_cultivating-death-by-martin-gruber_creation Last viewed 31 March 2017.
- 4.
Whilst I have used Western examples of such counter-narratives here, I have no doubt that similar complexity and texture exists in Vezo and Sora models of personhood and death, as well as in all the other cross-cultural materials I present in this volume. I refer to this issue in more detail in Chap. 1.
- 5.
This is the term for all the members of the community of Kangersuatsiaq.
- 6.
My interpretation of Nuttall’s text is that this is not the same Jonas (who is three years old) described above, but a separate individual.
- 7.
Telle notes that “most Sasak are Muslim but there is considerable variation in how Islam is practised and how it is understood to relate to adat, a loose body of customary knowledge and practices associated with the ‘ways of the old folks’ (cara dengan toaq)” (2007, 126).
- 8.
Although see Renske Visser (2017, 8) on her experiences as a researcher from the Netherlands conducting work in Britain, and how different public discourse on end of life and assisted dying is in the Netherlands, where it is legal, compared to Britain where it is not; she perceived a noticeable lack of willingness to talk openly about thoughts regarding at what point would someone no longer to wish to continue living in Britain compared to a relative ease of discussion on the same topic in the Netherlands. Other examples in Europe that point to a less sequestered relationship with death include the work of C. Nadia Seremetakis (1991) in rural Greece on women’s role in the mourning cycle, including practices of bone reading, second burial and exhumation, and the “traditional” funerals on the Isle of Lewis and other parts of the Outer Hebrides, Scotland, where up until the 1980s most funerals took place in the family home with the corpse remaining in the house between the death and the funeral (Caswell 2011) and where still today some speak of family and friends following the practice of “sitting with the dead” at home in the interval between death and funeral (Jon MacLeod, personal communication, January 2017).
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Degnen, C. (2018). Dismantling the Person?: Death and Personhood. In: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Personhood and the Life Course. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56642-3_8
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