Funerals
Funerals
Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski once observed that when persons are actually “faced by death,” they turn almost immediately instead “to the promise of life.” In other words, “death and its denial—immortality”—coincide (1954, p. 47). In many ways funerals express these dualities and their contrasting, ambivalent feelings and realities. In effect, funerals commonly aim to turn death, which appears to represent an end, into its opposite, a transition to another kind of life. Moreover, they seek to reintegrate the group and especially those most bereaved following the sense of loss that death has eventuated.
The funeral is almost always a social occasion, a ceremony at which those with a relationship to the deceased or the bereaved are assembled in order to mark the change in status that death has occasioned. The function of the funeral is to dispose of the corpse and to recognize the sense of loss among the bereaved. It also seeks to demonstrate to all of the assembled that while a particular person has died, life itself and the group go on. Hence while the disposal of the cadaver, an essential feature of the funeral, expresses dread of the corpse and a desire to be rid of it and its impurities while also confirming the reality and finality of the death, almost everything else about the funeral asserts immortality and continuity: of the soul, the community, a relationship with the deceased, and faith in the future.
The public nature of the funeral as well as the common understanding that attendance at it trumps most other social obligations both reflect the fact that death is never just the concern of the immediately bereaved or only the affliction of those who have died. While ostensibly carried out for the dead person, the funeral rites in fact have important effects and benefits for the living, both as individuals and a group. These rites commonly entail practices that aim to confront death with repeated assertions of life and expressions and ceremonial displays that make the bereaved feel that they are not completely abandoned. Moreover, they aim to show that death may momentarily bring about chaos, but the funeral reinstates order. It does so with ritual.
At a funeral’s successful conclusion, the dead body is disposed of and becomes separated from the person who inhabited it and the living are endowed with an enhanced sense of solidarity as they mourn and console one another back to life, while incorporating the deceased as part of a living memory. While this process is largely metaphorical in most funeral ceremonies, in some cases, the process is quite literal. Among the Melanesians of New Guinea, for example, parts of the dead person are ingested by some of the bereaved and later vomited. This practice allows the spirit of the deceased to remain within, and a sense of solidarity both among the mourners and between the mourners and the deceased to be established while the physical remains of the corpse are removed. The Catholic rite of communion, in which the body and spirit of Christ is ingested by those who recall him through the eating of consecrated bread and wine, may be understood as a reiteration of such funereal rites. All this shows that death ends a life but not a relationship.
Funerals may generally be divided into component parts. First comes the preparation of the corpse for disposal and its display. This may include washing, anointing or embalming, dressing, and even some forms of restoring the body. Often this is accompanied by a temporary public placement of the cadaver among the living, although always camouflaging its decay. This might, for example, include placing flowers or perfumes around the body. This use of flowers is as old as Neanderthal man, whose skeletons in the caves of Iraq were found covered with a layer of pollen, suggesting they were enclosed with flora.
In some cultures this public display may last several days—sometimes called “lying in state.” In others, this is called “the viewing,” and often the body is “improved” or adorned so that the repulsion of death does not overwhelm the living. Public placement includes placement of the body on a catafalque, sometimes in a casket, in shrouds, on a pyre, or some other visible site. In its origins, this public display of the corpse may have served as a means of making certain that the person was truly dead, as the certification of death was historically by no means always as accurate as it is today. The presence of the prepared corpse in public view thus provided both an opportunity to persuade everyone that the person was indeed deceased while also in some way mitigating the dreadful vision of death and its reminder of universal mortality.
When bodies were placed in private homes, particularly in Victorian England, they were often put in the parlor, the room in which people gathered. This led to the parlor taking the name, “living room,” as a way of offsetting the stigma and dread associated with the placement of corpses in it. In time, in North America, the placement of the corpse was moved from people’s homes and parlors or living rooms to special sites that came to be called “funeral parlors” or “funeral homes.” At times, funerals are carried on in places of worship, though in a number of religious traditions the corpse is considered defiling and hence not put in what are considered sacred places.
While a growing corps of professionals handle the preparation of the body, in some religious traditions volunteers from within the community of deceased or the bereaved carry this out. Thus, for example, among traditionally observant Jews, the preparations are carried out by the Chevra Kaddisha (holy fellowship) whose ritual washing, grooming, clothing, and preparation of the dead for burial are called tahara (purification).
The second part of the funeral consists of the rites and ceremonies of farewell. These include prayers, eulogies, and the marking of the mourners in some visible way. In some cultures, wailing or other forms of mourning are part of the funeral. But the possibilities of rites are as rich and varied as human culture. Thus, for example, among the Hmong of Vietnam, practices used during funeral ceremonies include: sacrificing a live chicken to place at the head of a deceased person in order that the soul of the chicken can lead the soul of the deceased person back to their ancestral home; burning gold paper money for the deceased to take on the journey home; and calling a shaman to communicate with the souls of the deceased to understand their wishes and communicate those wishes to family members. In general, the ceremonies of the funeral act to control the emotional damage that death may otherwise inflict by holding it within the framework of ritual behavior.
Part of the farewells consists of presenting the idea that death is really an alternative form of life, and the funeral initiates the transition from one form of life to another. In this sense, funerals may be seen as liminal or threshold rites, as described by Arnold van Gennep in his Rites of Passage (1960). For some groups, Jews for example, this period of transition should be short so as to hasten reintegration. For others, the farewell is extended so as to hold onto to the deceased a bit longer.
To assure the passage from death to a new life, the corpse must in some way be transformed. As Robert Hertz explained, “to make an object or living being pass from this world into the next, to free or create the soul, it must be destroyed,” and then only as the “visible object vanishes,” and becomes invisible, can it be “reconstructed in the beyond, transformed to a greater or less degree” (1960, p. 46). The removal or destruction of the dead body and the beginning of mourning marks the third and final part of the funeral. Among Hindus this is accomplished with the burning of the body and in India with floating it along the holy Ganges River. Among the Abrahamic faiths, this ends with the removal of the body for burial, although increasingly in modern society cremation is chosen as an option by many.
The transformation of the corpse is paralleled by a transformation of the bereaved into mourners. This is often marked either by activities they carry on at and after the funeral that publicly demonstrate their sense of loss. In some cases, the bereaved may tear their garments or hair, as if to reflect the tearing down of their own veneer of civility and social order that death itself has initiated. Of course by making this sort of rending ceremonial, funerary practices emotionally rein in the act and thereby assist the mourners in exercising self-control and limit the trauma of loss in public and to the collective life. The bereaved may be sequestered for a period of mourning that parallels the period of the deceased’s journey to a new life. The conclusion of mourning marks the true end of the funeral, when the dead have reached their spiritual destination and the bereaved re-enter a full social life. Often this is marked with eating and drinking, activities associated with continuity and life.
SEE ALSO Burial Grounds; Culture; Death and Dying; Heaven; Hell; Malinowski, Bronislaw; Religion; Rituals
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Heilman, Samuel. 2001. When a Jew Dies. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hertz, Robert. 1960. A Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representation of Death. Trans. Rodney and Claudia Needham. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1954. Magic Science and Religion. New York: Anchor.
Van Gennep, Arnold. 1960. The Rites of Passage. Trans. Monika Vizedom and Gabrielle Caffee. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Samuel C. Heilman