Postmortal Society

Towards a Sociology of Immortality

Michael Hviid Jacobsen, Michael Hviid Jacobsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317077220
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Throughout history mankind has struggled to reconcile itself with the inescapability of its own mortality. This book explores the themes of immortality and survivalism in contemporary culture, shedding light on the varied and ingenious ways in which humans and human societies aspire to confront and deal with death, or even seek to outlive it, as it were.

Bringing together theoretical and empirical work from internationally acclaimed scholars across a range of disciplines, Postmortal Society offers studies of the strategies adopted and means available in modern society for trying to 'cheat' death or prolong life, the status of the dead in the modern Western world, the effects of beliefs that address the terror of death in other areas of life, the 'immortalisation' of celebrities, the veneration of the dead in virtual worlds, symbolic immortality through work, the implications of understanding 'immortality' in chemical-neuronal terms, and the apparent paradox of our greater reverence for the dead in increasingly secular, capitalist societies.

A fascinating collection of studies that explore humanity's attempts to deal with its own mortality in the modern age, this book will appeal to sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers and scholars of cultural studies with interests in death and dying.

1How the dead survive

Ancestors, immortality, memory¹

Tony Walter

Introduction

How do the dead survive? How, if at all, may the living engage with them? The chapter sketches three of the more significant answers that have gripped human imagination and characterised particular cultures over millennia: (1) the dead become ancestors, (2) they become immortal, or (3) they survive in the memories of the living. The sketch highlights relations and tensions between the three: for example, how the immortality offered by world religions² has conflicted with ancestor veneration; how in the West secular memory started to replace religious care of the dead as a result of religious not secular innovation; the subtle relationships between remembering the dead and caring for them; and how memory of the dead in the West’s more secular societies may be mutating into a new form of ancestor veneration. I argue that each imagined post-mortem state is associated with an imagined social universe for the living (family, religion, diverse groups) and a particular purpose for funeral rites (to create ancestors, immortality, memories). Each form of post-mortem survival, therefore, is connected to the everyday life of society, drawing on and legitimating particular forms of society and ritual.³

I do not consider all the dead. In nearly every culture there are two kinds of dead available for interaction with the living (Goss & Klass 2005): the family dead, and the sacred dead who represent bigger groups and institutions that today would include religion (e.g. Jesus, the Buddha), the nation state (e.g. the war dead), politics (e.g. Mao) and culture (e.g. Beethoven, Elvis). Though the two are related, this chapter focuses on the family dead. My aim is to develop a socio-historical typology of death, survival and immortality of the familial dead across the ages; my hope is that this will shed some light on what twenty-first-century people do with their family dead.

The chapter does not cover all kinds of afterlife belief. It barely touches on reincarnation as found in some Eastern religions, in many tribal societies or as a popular discourse in contemporary Western society. And many details and variations cannot but be skated over, which may annoy some anthropologists and historians who relish details of the particular, but I trust they will at least grant that it is legitimate to attempt to develop typologies. The critical question is whether the typology that results from this chapter’s analysis is illuminating.

There is a view in social science, reflected in some of the chapters of this volume, that humans are universally anxious or fearful about their own personal survival, giving rise to the hopes of personal survival, whether literal or symbolic, to be found in most cultures. For Ernest Becker (1973) and Terror Management Theory (see Lifshin et al.’s chapter in this volume), such immortality strategies are not only part of culture, but a major driver of culture. This chapter’s reading of a range of archaeological, anthropological, historical and sociological material, however, questions such views. It suggests, rather, that survivors’ experience of the dead as temporary ancestor may be as significant as the not-yet-dead’s anxiety about their own finitude, perhaps more so. Anxiety about personal finitude may prove to have characterised primarily the three-millennia-long era of the world religions (Bowker 1991), and hence has been of particular relevance to the emergence of what is often called ‘civilisation’ – but much less relevant to most tribal societies or to post-religious secular societies.

Family ancestors

In many agricultural societies, those whose social position in life commanded respect continue in death to be respected as ancestors. Meyer Fortes (1965) argued that in Africa what becomes an ancestor is not the person, but simply the authority that the deceased had over their descendants, and this seems also to be the case in East Asia, though authority there has long been shared between ancestors and the state. Ancestors therefore reflect and/or support authority within kinship systems rather than personal attachment, and the details of ancestral life after death are of little concern to the living (Hamilton 1998).

The universality of ancestor veneration has been a matter of some debate (Parker Pearson 1999, ch. 7). Some economic anthropologists (e.g. Lehmann & Myers 1985; Meillassoux 1972) argue that ancestors are rarely found in hunter-gatherer societies

where the immediate returns on production provide no basis for a general sense of cultural ‘indebtedness’ to past generations. Agriculture is by contrast a peculiarly ‘ancestral’ mode of production precisely because current generations are indebted to the labour of previous generations.

(Whitley 2002:121)

Lyle Steadman et al. (1996), however, defining ancestral spirits more widely, find evidence of ancestors in a number of immediate return hunter-gatherer groups, which raises the question of the relation of ancestors to animism. Certainly among hunter-gatherers, human spirits and nature spirits are often interconnected and reside within the physical environment. David Chidester (2002:13) notes that for Australian aboriginal hunter-gatherers the ancestor is the totem group’s mythic founder who died long ago, contrasting with African agriculturalists for whom the ancestor is ‘not a cultural hero from the beginning of time but a close relative’ to whom one is personally indebted. Ninian Smart (1996:32) considers it possible that ancestors comprised humans’ very earliest concept of life after death. Without taking sides in this debate, we can say with confidence that ancestor veneration is very common in human history and pre-history. And it seems that ancestorhood as the post-mortem destination of those currently alive rather than the special status of a long-dead mythic hero characterises many agricultural societies. It is to these known ‘family’ ancestors that we now turn.

These ancestors’ agency continues with them beyond the grave (Espírito Santo & Blanes 2013). In Chinese society, ‘every death produces a potentially dangerous spirit. Funeral rites … convert this volatile spirit into a tamed, domesticated ancestor’ (Watson 1988:204). In many societies, the dead have power to meddle in the affairs of the living, to cause both harm and good; as well as the wise, beneficent ancestor whose guidance is valued, there is also the hungry or angry ghost out to cause trouble (Emmons 2003a; Jacobi 2003; Ochoa 2010). Trouble-making ghosts provide explanations for suffering and misfortune. Mary Douglas (2004:179) observes this was lost when monotheistic religion replaced all-too-human ancestors with a single all-loving God, thus creating the problem of theodicy: how to explain evil and suffering when the sole supernatural agent is all-powerful and all-good?

Ancestors’ agency is the basis for the living to interact with the dead in ritual processes of exchange (Baudrillard 1993). Gifts and prayers to the dead ensure that the dead aid, or at least do not harm, the living (Scott 2007; Suzuki 2013:17), the logic being one of mutual care, underlain by an implicit threat: if we look after you, you will look after us. Ritual exchange is often enabled by mediums (Emmons 2003b) and shamans (Vitebsky 1992). Exchange continues not for eternity, but for a few generations until memory – of the person, or of the grave’s location – fades, after which the ancestor becomes less known, less accessible, part of the ancestral collectivity or simply forgotten (Horstmann 2011; Mbiti 1970; Suzuki 2013; Watson 1988). Some ancestors, however, gain mythic status as family or clan founders, their stories told for many generations, justifying the occupation or ownership of land or enabling distant kin to be identified (Vansina 1985; Walter 2015; Watson 1988). In Canadian Pacific communities where the dead are reincarnated within the tribe, the ancestors are the living, giving extra force to twenty-first-century claims to ancestral land (Mills 2001).

Who becomes an ancestor, what rites create ancestors, and how long it takes for a recently dead individual ancestor to become subsumed into a more collective and impersonal body of ancestors, can vary considerably (Panagiotopoulos & Espírito Santo, forthcoming). Belinda Straight (2006:108) sketches wide variations across a range of societies: ‘Some deceased persons are denied agency altogether, deliberately annihilated, or just forgotten, whereas others are remembered for a time before slowly being de-individuated as their unique personhood is overcome by a collective (yet agentive) ancestral substance’. C. J. Calhoun (1980) considers that, in some African tribes, it is ancestors’ deadness, their inactivity, that detaches them from their pre-mortem unique personality and enables them to become idealised representations of authority. In several societies, it tends to be older males who, having status in life, gain post-mortem status as ancestor (Kopytoff 1971).

If veneration of family ancestors is ancient and widespread, how does it fare when subsistence agriculture encounters larger-scale social forces such as markets, cities, empires and formal religions? The answer is that ancestor veneration has been supported by some of these forces, and undermined by others. In East Asia, ancestors have continued strongly into the modern era. Confucius, unconcerned about the dead themselves, used ancestral respect to encourage respect for the living older generation (Park 2009, 2010), so that many Chinese today still demonstrate filial piety in part through ancestral rites (Bryant 2003; Watson & Rawski 1988). Likewise, Taoism and Shinto do not undermine exchanges with the family dead. Indeed, in Meiji Japan (i.e. from 1868), family became a symbolic microcosm of the nation, with family ancestor rites being used to sustain national identity. The Meiji government, instrumental in modernising the Japanese economy, ‘controlled Japanese people’s lives via control of death: it legitimated the household as a perpetual entity and demanded its successive performance of ancestor worship through the family grave’ (Suzuki 2013:15). Animist Shinto is also a source of spirits in Japan, enabling the land of Japan (nature spirits), family (ancestral spirits) and nation (the emperor, the deified war dead) to meld together. Under post-war conditions, Japanese ancestor veneration continues to evolve (Morioka 1986; Suzuki 1998).

Other social forces, however, undermined ancestors. While Western colonists saw no conflict between modernity and Christianity, they considered spirit worship to be superstitious, backward and even evil (Endres & Lauser 2011), as did postcolonial, capitalist and Communist modernisers. Mao was concerned that family loyalty undermined loyalty to party and state, so family funerals became simple, with family no more important than workmates; only the funerals of important local or national party members (ultimately Mao himself) were on any scale. More recently, under economic liberalism, some Chinese are reverting to family ancestors but in a more egalitarian way, reflecting personal choice and personal relationships rather than pre-Mao age/gender hierarchies (Goss & Klass 2005). In several Southeast Asian countries today, ancestral and other spirits are being revitalised ‘to address the risks and opportunities of economic restructuring and neo-liberal globalisation’; the modernity that is evolving is a ‘spirited modernity’ (Endres & Lauser 2011:3–4). A Chinese colleague described to me a medium-size business whose headquarters office block has a rooftop ancestral shrine where business decisions are checked out with the ancestors; here, Communists consult the family ancestors to ensure capitalist profits.

Religious immortality

That humans might seek not temporary ancestral status but immortality is found in the ancient Near East in the Epic of Gilgamesh and in Egyptian beliefs and mortuary practices. But it was the emergence of world religions that really challenged ancestor veneration.⁴ These religions, especially as they developed over time (Bowker 1991), came to offer immortality – forever (not just for two or three generations while kin survived to perform ancestral rites) and to everyone (including the lower classes, women, children and even slaves). This has proved particularly attractive to many excluded from ancestral status, whether in Africa (Jindra & Noret 2011), Korea (Park 2010) or elsewhere in the world.

As well as offering an immortality that was new and attractive, the monotheistic Abrahamic religions actively attacked ancestor veneration. Ancestors possess agency, the power to affect social life on earth, but in monotheism only the one true God (plus his appointed angels and saints) have legitimate supernatural power. So ancestr...