Death and Religion in a Changing World

Kathleen Garces-Foley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367649302
• eBook ISBN: 9781000588934
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Death and Religion in a Changing World is a comprehensive and accessible study of the intersection of death and religion, examining how everyday people enact religious responses to death in the twenty-first century.

With contributions from leading religious studies scholars, this book moves away from the field's focus on traditional beliefs to explore how religious traditions evolve in relation to their changing social contexts. Employing an ethnographic approach, Death and Religion in a Changing World further details how people from a wide variety of religious traditions and people without religious affiliation draw on and adapt religious practices as they respond to death in modern societies.

Every chapter in this second edition has been thoroughly updated and new chapters on the ethical issues of dying, including life-prolonging medical treatments, palliative care, physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia, and the modern hospice movement have been added. This book also covers emerging social and religious phenomena, such as public shrines, the Covid-19 pandemic, funeral celebrants, death with dignity, spiritual bereavement groups, and online funeral practices.

This cutting-edge work is essential reading for students and scholars of religion who are approaching the subjects of death and religion, and ritual studies.

1 At the Intersection of Death and Religion

Kathleen Garces-Foley

DOI: 10.4324/9781003126997-1

This book is a study at the intersection of death and religion in contemporary societies. Scholars of religion and culture have long found the intersection of death and religion fruitful. Death is a universal human fact, though human experiences of death vary greatly. It is the cessation of life, at least within a particular physical form, which is often but not always unwelcome. Death disrupts the normal order of things. It challenges our understanding of self and identity—do I continue in some way after the body has died or is death final? If I am more than my physical form, what is my true nature? Early scholars of religion proposed that the human experience of death is so profoundly disruptive it precipitated belief in immortality leading to the creation of religion. In The Future of an Illusion (1927) psychologist Sigmund Freud argued that the task of religion is to “reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death.”¹ Writing in 1955, anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski claimed,

Of all sources of religion, the supreme and final crisis of life—death—is of the greatest importance. Death is the gateway to the other world in more than the literal sense. According to most theories of early religion, a great deal, if not all, of religious inspiration has been derived from it.²

While the quest for the origin of religion has been replaced by new questions today, scholars continue to be fascinated by the variety, complexity, and vigor of religious responses to death.

The intersection of death and religion is a productive space for studying how humans grapple with big questions and everyday challenges. Faced with death, the living must respond, and their responses reveal much about their understanding of the world and their place in it. Responding to death is not only an opportunity for expressing strongly held beliefs; it is also a space for questioning beliefs and engaging in meaning-making. There is a great deal of scholarship on the human need to “make sense” of the world and our role in it.³ Within social networks, we are socialized to adopt beliefs and value orientations that have been historically articulated, but we also question and revise how we make sense of things in response to lived experiences.⁴ As religious scholar Robert Orsi explains,

Workplaces, homes, and streets—as well as churches, temples, shrines, class meetings, and other more immediately recognizable sites of religious activity—are the places where humans make something of the worlds they have found themselves thrown into, and, in turn, it is through these subtle, intimate, quotidian actions on the world, that meanings are made, known and verified.⁵

When death disrupts everyday life the living are forced to “make something” of their newly unsettled world “in relationships with each other and with gods, spirits, ancestors, and other significant beings.”⁶

The Academic Study of Religion

For many humans in many times and places, questions of meaning and purpose, and how to respond in a given situation, are addressed through a religious framework or worldview. What qualifies a way of thinking, being, and acting in the world as “religious” is an ongoing debate within the academic study of religion. “Religion” and “religious” are abstract constructs historically rooted in the efforts of nineteenth-century European academics to understand the relationship between Christianity and “others” encountered through a colonial lens.⁷ Conceptions of “religion” and classification systems of “religions” have been developed in concert with colonial projects and Christian theology. While religious studies scholars try to dislodge the study of religion from its Euro-Christian genealogy, how closely its analytical categories map to “facts on the ground” is particularly concerning in the study of the “non-Western” religions (classified as Eastern, Asian, Indigenous, Nature religions, etc.). Thanks in no small part to the power of Europeans and Euro-Americans to assert conceptual control by mapping the landscape of world religions, these categories have been adopted not only by religious studies scholars but by believers, practitioners, devotees, and so on.⁸ As Tomoko Masuzawa, author of The Invention of World Religions, explains:

[T]he reality of world religions today—that is, the stubborn facticity of these categories and the actual world that seems to conform to them in many ways—is obviously not of the European academy’s making, no matter how decisive its role.⁹

As we seek to understand the intersection of death and religion in the actual world, we begin with the recognition that “religion” and the categories of “religions” are historically unstable and are employed by scholars, religious actors, and others for specific social projects. It is common for scholars to acknowledge this while still stipulating a definition of religion such as: “religion is a set of beliefs, practices, and institutions related to a supramundane reality.” Rather than artificially stabilize our object of study, religious studies scholar Ann Taves argues that we should focus on the “processes whereby people decide on the meaning of events and determine what matters most.”¹⁰ If we shift from thinking of religion as a thing existing out there in the world, to thinking of religion in terms of processes or actions in the world, new possibilities emerge. Instead of trying to identify the “real” religion—for example, what is the correct Christian understanding of salvation—we focus on trying to understand how and why people have made particular claims about salvation as “authentically Christian” against other competing claims.

We can think of religious traditions as historically articulated ways of making sense of and acting in the world, which are dynamic and evolving as they are enacted by people in everyday lived experience. Sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger suggests that religious traditions operate as a “chain of memory” linking generations past, present, and future through collective beliefs.¹¹ They are not static systems of belief, but continually constructed ways of believing in reference to shared memories. Religious traditions are far from unified in their articulation, transmission, and, most importantly, in their enactment by particular people in particular places. They are contested terrain debated in scholarly treatises, over family dinners, and when planning a funeral. Ninian Smart suggests we think of a religious tradition “as a loosely held-together family of subtraditions.”¹² Some would argue that with so much variation it is erroneous to even speak of religious traditions in the singular; there is no such thing as Buddhism only Buddhisms, no Judaism only Judaisms, and so forth. Whether labeled in the singular or plural, scholars use the categories of religious traditions to point toward social realities in the world while simultaneously drawing attention to the historical contingency and limited usefulness of our analytical categories. For example, in this volume Maharshi Vyas challenges the category of “Hinduism” by contrasting approaches to death within Brahmanical scriptural traditions, bhakti (devotional) traditions, and subaltern Adivasi traditions. In the academic study of religion, the usefulness of these categories and the need to resist their misleading neatness co-exist in a dissatisfying truce.

Methods of Disposition, Practices, and Rituals

What people do in the face of death figures centrally in the following chapters. Death sets in motion a flurry of activity surrounding the body of the deceased as well as the social body. Something must be done with the physical body if for no other reason than that its presence will soon become unbearable. The technical term for “doing something with the body” is disposition, which is a far more pleasant word than disposal. Disposition means to arrange the body in a particular way. The common methods of disposition found around the world—burial (or entombment), cremation, exposure, and preservation—have been in use for a very long time.¹³

The oldest evidence of disposition is a burial site in Israel dating back 100,000 years. Excavations in Qafzeh Cave, Israel, reveal systematic burials of adults and children, the painting of bodies and objects with red ochre, and the placement of marine shells.¹⁴ Cave burial is rarely practiced today, but burial, whether in the ground, above ground, or in water, continues worldwide. The ancient Egyptian and Mayan methods of preservation have been replaced by modern embalming techniques designed to preserve the body until the funeral ceremony is held. A new type of preservation was invented in the 1960s, cryonics, though advocates of the practice, cryonicists, consider it a medical technique rather than a means of final disposition. Cryonics refers to freezing the body, or only the brain, to preserve it indefinitely with the expectation that future medical breakthroughs will enable the revival of the physical body that was erroneously declared “dead.” Exposure, which means to expose the body to natural elements and animals to speed the decomposition process, is rarely seen today. One present-day example is the Tibetan Buddhist “sky burial,” in which the physical remains are cut into portions and offered to birds and wild animals as an act of generosity. Zoroastrian exposure is still practiced by the Parsi community in India, where bodies are laid within enclosed “towers of silence” to be consumed by scavenger birds. New technologies offer twenty-first-century humans new methods of disposition, such as alkaline hydrolysis and human composting, but burial and cremation remain the commonly used methods of disposition.

Open-air cremation is practiced in some regions, such as India, Tibet, and Nepal, but as wood becomes scarce, mechanized cremation is increasingly used. Regions that previously practiced burial, such as North America and China, are adopting cremation for economic reasons but also because high rates of mobility mean families are no longer tethered to a particular place. Cremation is followed by a final disposition of the ashes, such as scattering them in a special location, burying them in a communal burial site, or placing them in a columbarium. In North America and Europe, it is increasingly common for ashes to be treated in highly personal and sometimes idiosyncratic ways that reflect the identity of the deceased.¹⁵ New options for memorializing ashes, such as incorporating them into jewelry, artwork, or artificial reefs, are proliferating.

In addition to considering the disposition of the deceased’s body, there is the social body to consider. Something must be done about or for the people coming together to mourn and honor the deceased. Funerals are a focal point of gathering mourners, which may take place over several days. Family roles and responsibilities often need to be reconfigured when a family member dies. Something must also be done about the deceased’s belongings. There are quite a number of practical tasks that may or may not be imbued with religious significance. However, the enactment of explicitly religious practices in the wake of death continues to be extraordinarily widespread. For our purpose of understanding religion as enacted in everyday life, the category of “practice” is especially useful.

In contrast to the behaviors prescribed by God, tradition, or a religious authority, practices are what people actually do in a given situation. Religious historian David Hall explains, “Practice always bears the marks of both regulation and what, for want o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• 1 At the Intersection of Death and Religion
• Part I Religious Approaches to Death
• Part II Death and Dying in Contemporary Societies
• Index