Death and Changing Rituals
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Death and Changing Rituals

Function and meaning in ancient funerary practices

J. Rasmus Brandt, Håkon Roland, Marina Prusac, Håkon Ingvaldsen , Marina Prusac

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eBook - ePub

Death and Changing Rituals

Function and meaning in ancient funerary practices

J. Rasmus Brandt, Håkon Roland, Marina Prusac, Håkon Ingvaldsen , Marina Prusac

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The forms by which a deceased person may be brought to rest are as many as there are causes of death. In most societies the disposal of the corpse is accompanied by some form of celebration or ritual which may range from a simple act of deportment in solitude to the engagement of large masses of people in laborious and creative festivities. In a funerary context the term ritual may be taken to represent a process that incorporates all the actions performed and thoughts expressed in connection with a dying and dead person, from the preparatory pre-death stages to the final deposition of the corpse and the post-mortem stages of grief and commemoration. The contributions presented here are focused not on the examination of different funerary practices, their function and meaning, but on the changes of such rituals – how and when they occurred and how they may be explained. Based on case studies from a range of geographical regions and from different prehistoric and historical periods, a range of key themes are examined concerning belief and ritual, body and deposition, place, performance and commemoration, exploring a complex web of practices.

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Yes, you can access Death and Changing Rituals by J. Rasmus Brandt, Håkon Roland, Marina Prusac, Håkon Ingvaldsen , Marina Prusac in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Sciences sociales & Anthropologie. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

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Publisher
Oxbow Books
Year
2014
ISBN
9781782976400
1
A PROPER BURIAL
Some Thoughts on Changes in Mortuary Ritual, and how Archaeology can begin to understand them
Liv Nilsson Stutz
What role does ritual play in mortuary practice and the handling of the dead body, and how can we understand ritual change? This article provides an opportunity to explore these fundamental questions through the lens provided by practice theory influenced by ritual theory, and through three case studies: two historical examples of ritual change in the handling of the dead body: the introduction of cremation in Victorian England, and the emergence of the American Way of Death (with embalming and the funeral home), and one prehistoric case: the handling of the death at two Mesolithic cemeteries in southern Scandinavia. It is argued that the focus on practice is especially valuable in archaeology since it is well adapted to the nature of our sources; the material remains of past actions. The author explores the usefulness of the practice focused framework, both to reflect over ritual change and changing rituals in historic periods and prehistoric periods where we are limited to the archaeological sources.
Keywords: American way of death, corpse, Mesolithic Period, mortuary ritual, practice theory, Scandinavia, Victorian England
How can archaeology study and understand ritual change and changing rituals? In order to begin to answer this question we need to understand why people need ritual and what role ritual plays in society. In the past, ritual was often understood as conservative in nature. This view has long been abandoned, but until recently, theory about ritual has (sometimes implicitly) emphasised its role in maintaining existing structures. Today, the focus in ritual studies has shifted toward seeing ritual as part of a process of social reproduction, a process that holds the potential for both continuity and change (Bell 1992). This view on ritual as dynamic and as an integral part of social and cultural reproduction is relevant in archaeology, which since its very beginning has attempted to understand and theorise change within a range of different schools of thought. But while archaeology may be comfortable with the concept of change, it is more challenged when approaching ritual. As opposed to other disciplines tied to the field of ritual theory, archaeology does not have access to the same kind of immediate information about the range of the practices, alongside the thoughts and motivation of the practitioners that are often obtained through written and oral accounts. We are limited to the fragmentary remains of what people in the past were doing. I will argue in this article that while archaeology’s fragmentary sources continue to constitute a challenge, the recent developments in ritual theory that emphasise practice point toward an important methodological opportunity.
In archaeology we need a theoretical framework that allows us to reflect on social and ritual dynamics on a general scale and that can be articulated to the nature of our sources. Any kind of model assumes a certain amount of generalisation and is founded on the idea that while every culture, and every individual is unique, the human condition is a shared experience, and the responses we have to different situations to a certain extent can be understood through generalising models that allow us to relate to other human beings across cultural and chronological boundaries.
In this article the problem of ritual change takes its departure in the universal experience of death and the encounter with the human cadaver. I argue that while the human responses to death and the cadaver may be extremely variable, all societies deal with death, and the responses tend to be ritual in character. After a general introduction to the theoretical understanding of the role of ritual in society and its particular role in mortuary practices, two historical cases of changing rituals are introduced in order to discuss the dynamic shifts in social practices that constituted the rituals. Finally, the model is tested on a prehistoric case, Mesolithic mortuary practices from Scandinavia.
The liminal cadaver
When a social being dies, the survivors are left not only with the abstract problem of loss and grief, but also with the concrete product of death: a cadaver. Archaeology has tended to overlook this aspect of death and focus only on the reconstruction of the role of the living – often as part of an archaeology more interested in burials for their potential for revealing social roles in life, than in their religious and ritual components. This is unfortunate, because how the body is handled in the mortuary ritual appears to be universally linked to important cultural phenomena that can give us a more complete image of past societies. The handling of the corpse reveals structures tied to attitudes toward the body, the self and other, the dead and the living, culture and nature, order and disorder, and the present, the future and the past, all potentially crucial dimensions of human life. As archaeologists we need to work toward a deeper understanding of these phenomena and how and why the ritual response to death may change over time.
In order to define the cadaver and understand it in a ritual context, I have been inspired by Julia Kristeva’s abject theory (1980) and Victor Turner’s concept of liminality and anti-structure (1969). Their respective models can be successfully combined in a discussion of the encounter with the cadaver and the process of dealing with it and redefining it through ritual. At death the system of the mindful body and the embodied mind (Csordas 1994; Schepher-Hughes & Lock 1987; Varela et al. 1999; and others) breaks down. The body is no longer a subject engaged in the dialectic of structured and structuring practices which simultaneously, through hexis, reproduce social order and embody it to the point of affecting how people feel and think (see Bourdieu 1977: 124; 1980: 117). The dead body that used to incorporate a person, a subject, is now radically changed on several levels. At first, while the cadaver still resembles the person it used to embody in so many ways, it is no longer this person. Moreover, the fact that death constitutes the starting point for an irreversible process of decay and destruction that will disfigure the remains and alter them forever, gives us a clear indication that social control and cultural shaping of the body no longer can be exercised from within, but can only be imposed from the outside. But while the body at death loses its subjective character, it does not immediately acquire an object status. Instead it is located somewhere in between these categories. In fact the cadaver can be perceived as an abject in the sense defined by Kristeva (1980). She introduced the term as a psychoanalytical and phenomenological category that builds on the French word abject, which designates something repulsive, low and despised (Rehal 1992: 15) and includes associations to the not-desirable, the borderline, and indeed, the viscerally repulsive. The abject is neither subject nor object, but a sort of pseudo-object located in between these defined categories. The human cadaver fits well within this model and Kristeva has actually defined it as ‘the ultimate abject’ (Kristeva 1980: 11). The lack of obvious separation between the living person and dead body introduces conflicting dimensions of desire and perversion, while the otherness of death causes the cadaver to be designated as taboo and non-object for desire (Rehal 1992: 16). Kristeva makes an important distinction when she points out that it is not the absence of purity or health that defines the abject, but that which disturbs an identity, a system and an order. That which does not respect the limits, the places, the rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the mixed (Kristeva 1980: 12). In other words, the category of the abject is especially useful when reflecting over the power of that which transgresses cultural categories and defies order, rather than as something inherently repulsive (we know for example, that the cadaver is not universally experienced as such). But when contemplating the concept of the embodied mind and the mindful body, invested with an embodied sense of rules and limits, we can begin to sense the danger of the cadaver. Here we have a body that is no longer controlled from within and thus threatens the order of things. Again, it may be important to point out here that this does not automatically mean that the bodily decay necessarily is seen as a horrifying experience. Rather, by acknowledging that death constitutes a crisis, we can also observe that no matter what values or associations are projected on the cadaver in different cultures, all cultures deal with it, albeit in a wide variety of ways.
Being no longer a subject nor an object, the cadaver seems to occupy a position that integrates well into Victor Turner’s model of liminality and anti-structure (Turner 1969). The cadaver, being neither fully dead nor alive, neither subject nor object, is clearly a betwixt-and-between category of person/body. It defines a truly liminal category that fits Turner’s definition of its two-fold character ‘at once no longer and not yet classified’ (1969: 96). While Turner’s model of communitas and anti-structure was developed to understand initiation rites, it can also be transposed to mortuary rituals as rites of passage more generally according to the framework proposed by Arnold van Gennep and which Turner continues to build upon, as rites which transfers an individual from a defined state to different but equally defined state (van Gennep 1981: 4). The need for the ritual stems from the fact that the cadaver has to be separated from the world of the living in order for the survivors to carry on with their lives. The cadaver, described as an abject, liminal phenomenon, threatening the order of society and life, constitutes a problem that has to be solved. Now that culture and society have no place within the body (through hexis), culture and society have to be imposed from the outside by others. Through cultural practice, the ritual handling of the dead body effectively transforms it from its identity as a living human being. Through the embodied practices of the survivors, the body of the dead, the cadaver, is ritualised and redefined. The process of ritual redefinition of the deceased – and of the cadaver – tends to generate structural connections with other ‘life crises’ or rites of passage, where the societal order is recreated and reinforced through embodied ritual practices. As action in response to the crisis of death, the mortuary practices are more or less explicitly linked to basic, embodied attitudes about life and death, and in turn, because these attitudes are connected – through their process of ritualisation – to concepts of self identity, order and disorder, culture and nature, individual and collective, etc., their embeddedness in the structuring structures that give form to society can help us to understand quite much about those structures. These rites of passage allow us to redefine the individual as dead and the abject as object, while at the same time helping us through the crisis that death generates and get on with life. The liminal phase is a time when mourners are allowed to mourn their dead, where life is secondary (Rosenblatt et al. 1976: 89–90). The duration of this period is highly variable within each culture and likely also on an individual level. In fact, on a personal emotional level, the transition often requires more time than is allowed for in the ritual structure (compare de Boeck 1995). But the symbolic transition from one state to the next helps define the borders that are being transgressed and provides a frame of reference for the social structure of the living.
At the same time, death is also the starting point for the processes of decay and decomposition that gradually will consume the body. This process alters the appearance of the cadaver further and thus imposes a time cap on the separation process. Mortuary rituals, in a variety of ways, handle this process as well. In some cultures, like our own, the processes of decay are hidden – our corpses are placed inside coffins or they are rapidly destroyed by fire. In the contemporary US the open casket burial takes the denial of decay to extremes, through embalming and restoring the cadaver so that it closely resembles the living individual in a state of sleep (see below). When we consider cadavers as abjects, we can better understand how they become the focus of the liminal phase of a ritual that aims to pass a person through the life crisis of death. The structural associations of oppositions and contradictions produced in dealing with death and the cadaver seem to stretch out beyond the physical remains of the body. They draw in opposing elements to the cadaver and thus form a symbolic complex that defines good vs. bad death. To control death as well as the dead body defines a ritual instrument for controlling biology and nature in a tight connection to controlling the social death. Thus, the mortuary ritual practices tend to embed the phenomenon of death – along with that of society – into an idea about the eternal order of things. In handling the cadaver in the right way, the survivors affirm the structure at a much more fundamental level than simply restoring a peaceful, effective arrangement of social relationships.
So how is this redefinition of the corpse possible? How does the ritual operate in this context, and how can we understand change in mortuary practices? In order to respond to these questions, we need to turn to ritual theory.
Understanding rituals as practice
Ritual studies have in recent years come to focus increasingly on practice (Bell 1992; de Boeck 1995; Humphrey & Laidlaw 1994; Parkin 1992). The main model draws on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (1977; 1980), but has its roots in the early sociological studies of ritual and religious phenomena (e.g., Durkheim 1965 [1915]; van Gennep 1981 [1909]), and the later forms they inspired in social and cultural anthropology (e.g., Rappaport 1999; Turner 1967; 1969). This theoretical framework is very useful for archaeology since it emphasises people’s actions rather than prescribed meaning and symbolic content. Like practice theory in general, it does not infer that practices are meaningless, but rather than embodied knowledge and bodily practice precedes verbalised meaning. Moreover, while these models build on sociological and anthropological studies and comparisons, they attempt to formulate how ritual as a process works. It is assumed that there are certain recurrent elements within ritual that allows us to formulate a series of cross-culturally shared fundamentally human mechanisms integral to the ritual process per se, which could be applied within archaeology.
Catherine Bell has proposed a comprehensive, influential and useful theory of ritual practice (1992). She views ritual as a strategic way to act and uses the concept ritualisation to distinguish ritual from non-ritual acts. Ritualisation, according to Bell (1992: 7), is a strategic way to act that, which, in the process of being carried out, creates a distinction from other practices, defining this specific practice – in relation to other practices in its social context – as ritual, privileged, significant and powerful. Bell draws on Bourdieu’s practice theory framework and sees ritualisation as proceeding in dialectic between practice and structure. The structures that give form to ritual may be said – in the sometimes difficult but carefully formulated language of practice theory – to structure and be structured by actions that tend to generate practices, memories, emotional sensations, symbolic representations, and so on, that display formal relationships organised into binary oppositions, often articulated hierarchically (Nilsson Stutz 2003: 41). Moreover, the structural links between the elements of ritualising practices intertwine into complex chains of associations, and despite the dynamic dialectical variation in ritual practices from one moment to the next, ritualisation generates a feeling of a logical system with a clear, comprehensive, hierarchically organised order. Through this process, a cosmology, i.e. a structured world of significance, is created through this production of separation. Ritual creates a world: a structure that appears to be logical and natural (for similar ideas see for example Turner 1969; Kertzer 1988). Instead of emphasising underlying meaning, this perspective on ritual underlines the process of embodiment. The model emphasises the embodied experience – it is the active participation in the ritual that creates the sense of structure in the participants. This further means that ritual does not express a meaning, nor does it reflect social structure; instead it creates and generates meaning and relationships (Bell 1992: 82; Bourdieu 1977: 120). Since meaning does not exist independent of practice, it is secondary. The ritual does not have to create a coherent and uncontested meaning for the participant; instead it is the embodied action that creates the sense of structure – not the rationalisations that the participants may give for their actions. This does not mean that rituals are meaningless. Perhaps it is better stated that practice theory emphasises a different understanding of meaning, as being inherent in action, which has social-historical consequences – no matter how small or short-term. This broader notion of meaning may be opposed to the classic, linguistically inspired structuralist conception, that meaning in ritual may be directly translated into a verbal reference (Nilsson Stutz 2003: 38). This further means that meaning as such can vary, while the embodied knowledge – the sense of how things are done – is shared. In the case here, it would mean that the participants would have a sense of what a ‘proper’ burial would be like, but they may still project different meanings to the practices.
What is particularly interesting here is that the model provides a framework to understand ritual change. Following practice theory, this model allows considerable potential for flexibility, through reinterpretation and appropriation. Since practice precedes meaning, every ritual event becomes a potential opportunity for reproduction or change. The change can be intentional and clearly break away from the dominating scheme, but it can also be gradual, almost invisible and unintentional, and only in a long term perspective become visible without the participants necessarily being aware of the process as it is taking place.
In the previous section we discussed how the handling of the cadaver constitutes a crucial component of mortuary ritual. When viewing this through the practice theory focused framework proposed by Bell, we can comprehend the treatment of the body as a response to the uncontrollable nature of the cadaver and indeed of death. Through ritualisation the cadaver is redefined into an object that conforms to structured ideas about death and from which the mourners can separate. The ritual practices create an image of death, and a final image of the dead, which conform to and can be articulated with more general ideas about a ‘good death’ (relating to attitudes to life, death, the dead body etc.) and through these practices the social and cultural structure is reproduced through the structure-practice dialectic. When viewing the mortuary ritual and the ritual redefinition of the cadaver from this perspective, every burial – or every other occasion for a mortuary ritual...

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