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Death in the Early Twenty-first
Century
 Sébastien Penmellen Boret • Susan Orpett Long • Sergei Kan
Editors

Death in the Early

Twenty-first Century
Authority, Innovation, and Mortuary Rites
Editors
Sébastien Penmellen Boret Susan Orpett Long
IRIDeS Bureau John Carroll University
Tohoku University University Heights, Ohio, USA
Aoba, Sendai, Miyagi, Japan

Sergei Kan
Department of Anthropology
Dartmouth College
Hanover, New Hampshire, USA

ISBN 978-3-319-52364-4 ISBN 978-3-319-52365-1 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52365-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017940491

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
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 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The chapters included in this volume were originally presented during a

double session on “The Anthropology of Death: Social Change, Religion
and Syncretism,” which was organized for the American Anthropological
Association annual meeting in Chicago in November 2013. The only
exception is the contribution of Long and Buehring that was added to
complete the structure of the book and its rationale. We would like to take
this opportunity to express our sincere gratitude to Michael Jindra from
the University of Notre Dame, with whom Sébastien had the great privi-
lege and pleasure to organize this session. Also, we would like to thank the
presenters whose papers, for various reasons, did not end up being includ-
ing in this volume: Kalyani D. Menon, Rebecca Marsland, Satsuki
Kawano, Hannah Rumble, and Hikaru Suzuki. Their participation signifi-
cantly contributed to the success and some of the ideas found in this book.
Finally, we would like to thank the Japan Society for the Promotion of
Science (JSPS) that at the time of the conference, was sponsoring
Sébastien’s postdoctoral fellowship (2012–2014) at Tohoku University.
We are also very grateful for financial assistance from John Carroll
University for the final stage of manuscript preparation.
If the outcome belongs to each and every author of this book, Susan,
Sergei, and I remain indebted to all the people involved in bringing this
project to completion. We hope that this volume constitutes a modest but
hopefully noteworthy milestone in the anthropology of death.

v
 CONTENTS

1 Introduction 1
Sébastien Penmellen Boret, Susan Orpett Long
and Sergei Kan

Part I Culture, Religion, and the Uses of Tradition

2 Fear and Prayers: Negotiating with the Dead in Apiao,

Chiloé (Chile) 31
Giovanna Bacchiddu

3 Quelling the “Unquiet Dead”: Popular Devotions

in the Borderlands of the USSR 63
Catherine Wanner

4 Life After Death/Life Before Death and Their Linkages:

The United States, Japan, and China 85
Gordon Mathews and Miu Ying Kwong

Part II Personhood, Memory, and Technology

5 Reincarnation, Christianity and Controversial Coffins

in Northwestern Benin 115
Sharon Merz

vii
viii CONTENTS

6 For the Solace of the Young and the Authority

of the Old Death: Photography in Acholi,
Northern Uganda 151
Sophie H. Seebach

7 Mediating Mortality: Transtemporal Illness Blogs

and Digital Care Work 179
Tamara Kneese

Part III Individual, Choice, and Identity

8 Agency and the Personalization of the Grave in Japan 217

Sébastien Penmellen Boret

9 Remembering the Dead: Agency, Authority,

and Mortuary Practices in Interreligious Families
in the United States 255
Susan Orpett Long and Sonja Salome Buehring

Index 291
 LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 2.1 The fiscal Abelardo Neun and Eliana Guenchuman, table
guest, with their ritual gift of bread and meat on the last night
of novena 43
Fig. 2.2 Erica Velasquez and her niece Tamara Calbuante, lighting
candles on an old family tomb, after having placed a freshly
made flower crown 51
Fig. 2.3 Rosendo Millalonco, prayer specialist, praying at a family
tomb on Souls Day 53
Fig. 3.1 Political map of Ukraine Wikimedia commons 65
Fig. 3.2 Two examples of a rushnyk 76
Fig. 5.1 Map of the Republic of Benin and surrounding countries 117
Fig. 5.2 Body in burial chamber in foetal position 119
Fig. 5.3 Piercing a hole in the earthenware pot 131
Fig. 6.1 Lanyero’s picture of her dead husband 152
Fig. 6.2 Women are preparing Ventorina’s body for the funeral 164
Fig. 6.3 A picture from Mary’s photo album. Note the cross on the
foreheads of the man standing to the right, and of the child 172
Fig. 8.1 Outer view of the tree burial cemetery: Its mountain and
surrounding paddy fields and vegetable gardens 222
Fig. 8.2 Inner view of the tree burial cemetery: A grave composed
of a tree, a wooden tablet on the left, and the network of
footpaths 223
Fig. 9.1 A grave marker of a Christian husband and a Jewish wife,
United States 276
Fig. 9.2 A tombstone of a Jewish husband and Christian wife, illus-
trating the trend toward the personalization of mortuary
practices, United States 277

ix
 LIST OF TABLES

Table 5.1 Coffins: good, bad or indifferent? 127

xi
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Sébastien Penmellen Boret, Susan Orpett Long and Sergei Kan

Since its beginnings, the discipline of anthropology has encompassed

the study of death, describing the centrality of its rituals in our lives,
the richness of its material culture, and its multilayered functions and
meanings in societies past and present. Looking at mortuary rites,
anthropologists examine the ways a community deals with the depar-
ture of the deceased and the disposal of his or her remains, material
and immaterial. To the Western reader this would usually imply
a funeral, followed by burial or cremation. Yet anthropological
research has shown tremendous variety in practices across the

S.P. Boret (*)

IRIDeS Bureau, Tohoku University, Aoba, Sendai, Miyagi, Japan
S.O. Long
John Carroll University, University Heights, Ohio, USA
S. Kan
Department of Anthropology, Dartmouth College, Hanover,
New Hampshire, USA

© The Author(s) 2017 1

S.P. Boret et al. (eds.), Death in the Early Twenty-first Century,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52365-1_1
2 S.P. BORET ET AL.

globe, including secondary burials, feasts, and commemoration of

death anniversaries, from ancestor veneration in East Asia to the
Jewish custom of yahrzeit. Anthropologists have come to conceptualize
death rituals as rites of passage for the individual and the community,
focusing on death not as an ending, but rather as an occasion for
restoring social equilibrium and promoting sociocultural continuity
(Hertz 1907; Van Gennep 1960). Viewing death as part and parcel
of daily life in a community, more social and cultural anthropologists
came to focus on the ways ideas and practices of death relate to
complex sociocultural, economic, and technological domains within
societies.
Building on these earlier insights, anthropological research on death
beginning in the last years of the twentieth century has paid increased
attention to the broad and dramatic changes experienced by much of the
world due to colonialism and post-colonialism, and the increasing impact
of global capitalism. In addition, large-scale migration and new commu-
nicative technologies have provided alternative ways to view the relation
between the individual and society, and new economic structures have
changed and expanded political power and social interaction. All of these
potentially challenge customary ways of performing and thinking about
funerals and memorialization. If it was ever true in the past that customs
were relatively unquestioned, globalization and the Internet revolution
have dramatically affected the scale and the speed at which contemporary
global trends are recreated, used for new purposes, and applied practically.
Alternative rituals and meanings drawn from elsewhere are selectively
incorporated into local contexts and inspire new interpretations.
This volume goes a step further, contributing to “anthropology’s tool-
box” (Knauft 2006) for the study of death by asserting that funerary
rituals and memorial rites not only reflect but also provide a conduit for
cultural change, as the meaning and place of the individual in society are
redefined in the context of new ideas, practices, and technologies. Its eight
essays focus on a wide range of societies based on field work carried out in
the early twenty-first century. The authors’ rich descriptions from places
with varying geographies, religions, and economies allow us to explore
changes and question broadly the ways people face death, conduct ritual,
and recreate the deceased in memory and in the material world. In all
situations, agency to act in response to death and authority to make
decisions about ritual and memorialization are challenged, reasserted,
and negotiated in the context of changing ideas and technologies.
 INTRODUCTION 3

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF DEATH AND SOCIOCULTURAL CHANGE

Among the first anthropologists to focus on death as a significant cultural
and biological event, Robert Hertz (1881–1915) held that mortuary rites
served to reestablish the original state of a society that had been disrupted
by the death of an individual. One of Durkheim’s most promising pupils,
Hertz authored one of the foundational texts in the study of mortuary rites,
A Contribution to the Study of Collective Representation of Death, published
in the French journal L’Année Sociologique in 1907. This study is based on
the mortuary practices he observed among the Dayak of Borneo as well as
examples from Melanesia, Polynesia, Australia, and Native North America.
Hertz argued that death ritual functions in society to simultaneously trans-
form the corpse, the soul, and the bereaved, while the entire community
returned to a state of equilibrium.1 This approach to death has inspired the
development of the anthropology of death well into the twenty-first century
(see Goody 1962; Bloch 1971; Danforth 1982; Metcalf 1982; Kan 1989,
2015; Suzuki 2000; Conklin 2001).
Along with changes in anthropology more broadly, death studies in the
field moved away from functionalism to emphasize ritual and symbolic
dimensions of mortuary ritual (notably, Huntington and Metcalf 1991 and
Bloch and Parry 1982). In these volumes, the social, cultural, and techno-
logical elements of death rituals are intertwined. Bloch and Parry distinc-
tively examine the frequent “relationship between mortuary beliefs and
practices and the legitimation of the social order and its authority structure,”
where individuals maintain their position of authority as well as the eternal
order by “transforming the dead into a transcendent and eternal force,” thus
denying the arbitrariness and finality of individual death (Bloch and Parry
1982: 41). Other works have also recognized the significance of processes of
exchange in mortuary rites, including Damon’s edited volume on Death
Rituals and Life in the Society of the Kula Rings (1989) and Barraud’s
(1994) Of Relations and the Dead. These essentially focused on the tradi-
tional authority of societies that are “based on unchanging eternal order
grounded in nature or in divinity” (Palgi and Abramovich 1984: 391–392).
Kan (1989, 2015) demonstrated in his study of the mortuary and memorial
rites of the nineteenth-century Tlingit Indians of Alaska that this “unchan-
ging eternal order” was grounded for the Tlingit in the ideal of an eternal
existence of matrilineal kinship groups, which perpetually recycled their
collectively owned personal names/titles and other tangible and intangible
sacred possessions.
4 S.P. BORET ET AL.

The rapidity of change widely experienced in societies throughout the

world challenge past assumptions of a stable social order. These disruptions
and transitions are being explored in newer approaches to the anthropol-
ogy of death. Essays on mortuary rites in modern-day Africa in a volume
edited by Jindra and Noret argue that funerals represent “occasions for the
(re)production and the (un)making of both solidarities and hierarchies,
both alliances and conflicts” as well as Durkheimian “moments of social
communion in the face of death” (2011: 2). Earlier approaches to death
rituals cannot offer a completely satisfactory picture of mortuary practices
in societies “where authority and legitimacy are multiple” (2011: 4). Our
volume continues that critique.
Although changes are experienced in local contexts, colonialism, post-
colonialism, secularization, and globalization have resulted in changes that
can be broadly identified across many societies, including transformations
within their realms of death. For instance, the uniqueness of the Mexican
version of All Soul’s Day, such as its carnivalesque and macabre performances
and its sweets in the shape of skulls and skeletons, is often thought to have
originated in indigenous customs. However, recent research suggests that
the Mexican “Day of the Dead” could also be “a colonial invention” result-
ing from demographic (epidemics and massacres), economic (sugar trade),
and acculturation (Christianization) processes initiated by Spanish conquer-
ors (Brandes 1997: 293). A similar relationship between mass death and
mortuary rites can be found in African societies suffering from epidemics of
HIV/AIDS since the 2000s. Scholars have suggested that the exponential
increase of mortality there has contributed to rapid changes in the way
people deal with death. In Kenya, the social stigma attached to victims of
HIV/AIDS challenges the Christian belief in life after death, and seems to
shift funerals from the public to the private domain, while in South Africa
infected individuals are seen as “dead before dying” (Nzioka 2002; Niehaus
2007; see also Kilonzo and Hogan 1999).
Global changes affecting ideas and practices of death include increased
ideological and physical control by the state over local ritual practices, the
spread of so-called “world religions” and the simultaneous rise of funda-
mentalism and secularism. For example, scholars of colonial Africa have
discussed the broad influence of missionaries and the colonial govern-
ments on the ways people negotiated their indigenous funerals and burials
for the self-proclaimed “civilized” and “sanitized” mortuary rites. During
the post-colonial era, struggles over the performance of death rites not
only served debates over national identities and statehood, but also led
 INTRODUCTION 5

to the transformation of death practices by, for example, fusing Christian

and pre-colonial imagery (Lee and Vaughan 2008: 345–355). New practices
may challenge or accommodate previously existing beliefs about death, the
afterlife, and what constitutes proper funerary and memorial ritual. Thus, as
Merz describes in this volume, people in northwestern Benin perceive
different options for burying the dead according to the “new ways” or the
ancestral ways. New ways of burial become feasible as people reinterpret
existing beliefs about how an individual’s animating force, identity, and body
interrelate before and after death. Also in this volume, Mathews and Kwong
trace the correlation between beliefs about the afterlife and the way people
live in affluent societies in which religious and secular ideologies coexist and
intertwine. Many Japanese people Boret (Chapter 8) met who seek out
ecological burial interpret traditional symbols of the regeneration and con-
tinuity of the immaterial life-force by envisioning their ashes as fertilizing the
vegetation that marks and surrounds their burial places.
Colonialism and post-colonialism have also led to the experience of
migration, raising questions about dying and death far from the home
community. The violence and injury accompanying migration for eco-
nomic and political reasons may lead to migrants’ deaths where there are
no appropriate kin and community members with the cultural expertise to
perform customary death rites. To counter the uncertainties and meet the
needs of migrants, traditions might be reinterpreted, once banned prac-
tices tolerated, and new practices accepted. The many examples include
the taking of photographs of the washing and burial of the dead among
the Muslim diaspora in Berlin, which, originally considered haram (for-
bidden), serve now both as proofs that the “proper” mortuary practices
have been followed, and as mediums between the migrants and those
living in the motherland (Jonker 1996). Chilean migrants in Sweden
created a new ritual to compensate for the absence of burial, a “funeral
in exile” (Reimers 1999). Migrants may contribute to the transformation
of mortuary rites at home, like those of Ghana whose remittances to their
family transformed funerals into lavish events (Mazzucato et al. 2006). As
Seebach documents in this volume, even in the case of the death of those
who do not leave, the immigrants’ absence from funerals and memorial
occasions is felt by those remaining at home, and alternatives sought to
their timely presence. Another discussion of the colonial experience is
Wanner’s chapter on the incorporation of western Ukraine into the
Soviet Union, with implications for ritual practice and the relationships
with people newly considered to be among the ancestors.
6 S.P. BORET ET AL.

Perhaps the most evident change of our time is the introduction and
adaptation of new technologies. These may have a direct relation to
death rituals, such as the nineteenth-century development of arterial
embalming technology in the United States, leading to the possibility
of delaying funerals or holding elaborate wakes. Modern arterial
embalming has subsequently become more common elsewhere, such
as France (Puymérail et al. 2005). In contemporary Africa, societies
experiencing urbanization, migration, and war have also turned to
refrigeration, embalming, and digital mourning, sometimes alongside
traditional ideas and practices (Lee and Vaughan 2008: 343). Scholars
have considered the ways in which new technologies complicate
boundaries between life and death, and how they affect definitions of
personhood (Lock 2002; Franklin and Lock 2003; Sharp 2007). The
advancement of technology facilitates the ideology of death as an
individual journey in which choices are made along the way. At the
center of this notion are the anthropological distinction between bio-
logical and social death, questions of the relative authority of medical
personnel and technology in these processes, and the idea of death
becoming a “choice” (Lock 2003: 189) by individually drawing from a
range of cultural scripts about dying (Long 2005). In some cases, the
technology comes into being in totally unrelated contexts but is
adapted for uses related to death. Kneese’s chapter in this volume
brings into focus care/memorial blogs for the dying on the Internet,
but even the cameras of mobile phones can have an impact on people’s
ability to be part of ritual from a distance and on the interpretation of
the nature of the death and ritual, as Seebach found in Acholi society.

AGENCY, AUTHORITY, AND MEMORY

INCHANGING MORTUARY PRACTICES
This volume argues that especially in changing sociocultural landscapes,
the multiple agencies of the deceased, the survivors, and others recog-
nized as legitimate cultural actors means that the authority to make
decisions about and to interpret death practices is subject to negotiation,
contestation, and resistance. Since the 1980s anthropological theory has
ceased to focus solely on “anonymous and supra-individual entities,” or
structures. Bourdieu, among others, began to pay more attention to the
central role of the actions and approaches adopted by individuals in
 INTRODUCTION 7

response to the wider social structures in which they live (Bourdieu

1977; see also Ortner 1984; Giddens 1984). However, anthropology
also denies that individual agency can be independent of structure.
Rather it insists that agency depends on culture for its form and actua-
lization, and is internalized through action (Butler 1990) and the various
disciplinary techniques of the social structure (Foucault 1995). At the
same time, agency is not deterministic, so although human behavior,
including rituals, generally reinforces the social structure, it can also
produce and affirm alternatives to it. Understanding mortuary practices
thus requires careful consideration of the workings of agency, authority,
and the creation of memory in both the larger society and in the intimate
spaces, which accommodate the underlying processes leading to the
transformations and innovations of contemporary mortuary rituals.

Agency
With regard to death, the understanding of agency varies in different
ethnographic contexts, consistent with local understandings of the
human, natural, and supernatural worlds. Frequently, agency extends
beyond humans, located in animals, in ritual items, in the state, and
certainly in the deceased and his/her spirit, ghost, or soul. The need to
exert human or godly control over other agents motivates much mortuary
practice. In her chapter on death in Apiao, Bacchiddu relates that in this
isolated community, which has experienced less directly and intensively
the global forces outlined above, balancing the power of various agents
involved in the death can be a significant post-mortem responsibility.
Under conditions of more rapid social change, these understandings may
be questioned, rejected, or altered. Some of our chapters shed light on the
novel agency of actors who might have historically been absent from the
process of decision-making. For instance, the chapters in Part III investi-
gate the agency of the dead-to-be over his/her own funeral ceremony,
referring to Beck and Beck-Gernsheim’s notion of “Death of One’s Own,
Life of One’s Own” whereby choice over death rites is no longer a case of
free will but an obligation imposed upon the individual to choose his/her
own ways of death (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2001; see also Walter
1994; who draws on Giddens 1991). Likewise, people may attempt to
control the way that they will be remembered after their death, such as
designing and contracting for their own grave. Social, economic, and
geographic mobility and the introduction of new ideologies lead to the
8 S.P. BORET ET AL.

redefinition of what or who constitutes an agent. We are particularly struck

by the ways that changes in agency may lead to ritual innovation, resulting
in changes in the way death rites are conducted and interpreted.
Transformations of death practices reflect both external, structural influ-
ence and local agency.

Authority
Of course potential agents may not all have the same ability to influence the
consequences of the death. Decisions about ritual, life going forward, and
the creation of the memory of the death and the deceased take place in
contexts of unequal influence and power. In our book, we thus also draw
upon the idea of authority and ask questions of which actors have cultural
legitimacy, whose views matter more, and how broader changes in society
can challenge those assumptions and customary practices. For example,
several scholars have pointed to the historical increase in the intervention of
the state in practices surrounding death (see Verdery 2000; Farrell 1980;
Bernstein 2006). The varying relationship among religions, the state, and
community and personal responses to death suggest that authority and
control over mortuary rites and memory is differently located in different
societies as well.
Historically, mortuary rituals, disposal of the body, and the memorializa-
tion of the dead were often matters of family and community concern but
practices were grounded in worldviews that included assumptions about
powerful supernatural agencies. Thus to the extent that a community had
specialists to deal with supernatural matters, these ritual or religious leaders
were seen as having authority, along with the family, elders, and so on over
when and how things were done. With the growth of codified formal
religious traditions, the authority of clerics was even stronger and religious
institutions were considered responsible for creating the broad cosmological
canvas underlying funerals and burial practices.
The development of a scientific understanding of the world, which
viewed life and death as part of nature, began to challenge seriously the
near-monopoly held by religious leaders on the subject of death. The surge
of scientific thinking was strengthened by the Industrial Revolution, and in
particular mass production of funerary goods, the advent of modern
embalming, urbanization, and the dispersal of kinship networks (Mitford
1998; Ariès 1974; Kawano 2010; Suzuki 2000, 2013). This has resulted in
highly industrialized, affluent settings in a sharing and to some degree, a
 INTRODUCTION 9

transfer of authority to private industry and to “experts” in funerary ritual

and bodily disposal. As societies encounter some degree of “western”
science, industrialization, and capitalism, elements of these newer practices
may be presented, adopted, and adapted by local authorities and agents to
suit their beliefs and practices, as some of the chapters in this volume attest.
The politicization and secularization of mortuary practices is a significant
trend in some of the ethnographic scenarios described in this volume, but
agency and authority also play out in the more private spaces of people’s
lives. Claims to authority may include not only active resistance to the
status quo, but also interpersonal struggles within a family or community
that go unnoticed in the larger public sphere. Investigating negotiations in
the intimate domain, our volume identifies the interrelationship between
authority and agency in the lived space where structure and agency inter-
sect. Despite contemporary ideologies of individual autonomy, negotia-
tions and tensions among those involved in a death continue even in
societies that encourage living wills and pre-arranged funerals. Thus, we
argue, agency and authority have become the sine qua non of the contem-
porary studies of death-related practices.

Memory
It is also necessary to think about the ways that people claim legitimacy to
define the life of the deceased and its significance. Memorialization refers
to the processes creating social or collective memory through tangible
(monuments, memorial sites) and intangible (ceremonies, narratives, etc.)
acts of remembrance. Acts of public memorialization are often associated
with the broader politics of national, ethnic, racial, and religious identities
and the making of colonial histories (Halbwachs 1975; Connerton 1989;
Nora 1989; Verdery 2000; Haas 1998). More recently, anthropologists
have studied the making of memory in more intimate and personal
domains such as that of kinship. Carsten (2007), for example, demon-
strates how personal and collective memories are mutually entrenched in
the understanding of relationships. In his study of death in the contem-
porary United States, Green (2008: 160) suggests that memory has
replaced the religious emphasis on the afterlife in mortuary ritual, “com-
mitting the dead to living memory rather than a locale beyond the natural
world” (p. 160). He goes on to talk about an American “cult of memory”
that he finds to be a “distinctly postmodern idiom” in societies in which
no other type of immortality seems possible. Yet the importance of
10 S.P. BORET ET AL.

memory is highlighted in a variety of societies examined by the authors of

this volume, and taken together, this work informs us of the common
relationship between mortuary rites and the (re)production of memory
within the intimate spheres of everyday life and interpersonal relationships.
Of particular interest to us is the understanding that memorialization is
not a single event or a series of practices and rituals. Rather, it is an
ongoing process that builds on, yet continually alters, past perceptions.
Some of the authors of this volume consider questions of agency and
authority in the social process of personal memory construction through
mortuary rites, reminding us that “neither the production of the self nor
the memory is pre-scripted or foreclosed” (Castern 2007: 26), but always
in the making. Memorial ceremonies “celebrating” the life of an indivi-
dual, that is, funerals, the modes of disposing of the deceased’s body, the
handling of material belongings associated with the departed, a blog, and
other digital memorial remains dedicated to the beloved lost through
illness (discussed in Kneese’s chapter) all contribute to the continued
existence of the personhood of the dead, or as Long and Buehring in
this volume choose to name it, the “post-death self.” Memorialization
thus contributes to the agency of the deceased in the private, and some-
times the public, realm, and thus to the transformation of death practices
in the twenty-first century.
The significance of memorialization as an approach to dealing with
death in some contemporary societies forms the basis for some of the
most novel modes of disposal that have arisen, including “green” or tree
burials discussed by Boret or the recent technological use of QR codes or
steel-cased computer chips embedded in tombstones that enable visitors
to learn about the deceased’s life, sometimes through his or her own pre-
recorded voice (Riechers 2013). By adopting such practices, the “dead-to-
be,” that is, the living who are facing or planning for their deaths, not only
express agency but also acquire cultural authority over the representation
of their own death. Through this practice, they attempt to ensure that
their memories and their remains will be dealt with according to their own
ideas of death and the memory and/or legacy they wish to leave behind.
Yet our volume also demonstrates that these efforts remain dependent on
the actions of surviving individuals and institutions. The detailed ethno-
graphic accounts of each chapter take us to the heart of the interperso-
nal processes of decision-making, conflicts, and negotiations that
surround death practices. Rather than assume that established structures
(including classifications based on ethnicity, religion, social class, and
 INTRODUCTION 11

economic status) elicit particular ideas and behavior, the authors of our
chapters reveal the ways that the participation of culturally recognized agents
and the negotiation of authority enable people to bypass, adapt, or give new
meanings to rituals and ideas of death. Thus death is not always a conserva-
tive rite of passage that reinforces the structure and values of the society
(Davies 2005). Our chapters show that death rites involve dynamic processes
of decision-making, leading to productions and reproductions of innovative,
syncretic, or enduring meanings and practices of death. These upcoming
mortuary rites might constitute a form of resistance to powerful institutions
(religion, state, or otherwise) or/and changes in established ideas of death.
Whether public or private, in their relatively constant state of “becoming,”
death practices may reinforce values and practices long present in a society,
but in some situations, what looks “traditional” may be utilized for new
purposes, and what looks new may be strategically employed to fortify older
ways of life.

AGENCY, AUTHORITY, AND THE USES OF TRADITION

In Part I of this volume, authors explore rites and ideas about death in
relation to cultural and religious practices understood as “tradition.”
These ethnographies come from societies quite different from each other
in their level of affluence and degree of commitment to a religious heri-
tage. Bacchiddu works on an island off the coast of Chile, a society
relatively isolated from state power and global economics, espousing
egalitarian values, and whose dead are feared as having the capacity to
sanction inappropriate behavior among the living. If they are cared for
properly, the ancestors are benevolent. They are thus seen as retaining
agency after death. In death rites, people must negotiate both with the
spirits of the dead and with their neighbors and friends in a system of
exchanges meant to assure the safety of the survivors and the continuity of
their way of life. Bacchiddu does not assume that people blindly follow
traditional rites, but rather observes them putting forth great effort to
control the intervention of the deceased’s spirit by engaging their own
agency through their social relationships with the living.
There is also concern about the agency of the “unquiet dead” in rural
western Ukraine where Wanner has studied mortuary practices as lived
religion in the aftermath of the Second World War and during conditions
of state-orchestrated hostility to religious institutions. During that time,
local death rituals attempted to ensure the salvation of the soul as the last
12 S.P. BORET ET AL.

act of reciprocal exchange between generations. This was especially impor-

tant in the context of state-sponsored violence and wartime destruction,
which was the source of many “bad deaths,” for which the deceased might
extract revenge on the living. Proper attention to ritual prescription
ensured that the dead would not harm their living kin, remain peaceful,
and even serve a protective function over successive generations. In this
way, death rituals also served to link the generations to each other and
articulate a definition as to who counts as an ancestor and what the
obligations of the living are to the dead. However, efforts to deal with
the active agency of the dead were complicated by the authority of the
Soviet state, which outlawed certain churches and arrested overly visible
practitioners. In such a context, mortuary practices rooted in the local
“lived religion,” in which the dead are active agents, had to be partially
improvisational, creative, domesticated, and gendered within the inter-
stices of the authority of the Soviet state over death.
Both Bacchiddu and Wanner describe rural societies where strong
ambivalence marks the prevailing attitude of the living toward their dead
kin. On the one hand, the dead must be placated and remembered by
means of elaborate funeral and memorial rites and periodic prayers and
offerings. On the other hand, the living are eager to forget them by
avoiding contact with dead bodies, cemeteries, and so forth. Thus by
“paying their debts” to the dead, the living keep them at bay, though
larger structural forces may impact their ability to do so.
In contrast to both western Ukraine and Apiao, Mathews and Kwong
provide a comparative perspective on ideas about death based on ethno-
graphic interviews in three economically affluent societies, the United
States, Japan, and China. They argue that religious belief influences not
only what people think happens after death, but how a sense of post-death
existence, or the denial of it, helps shape their lives in the present. The
cultural sources of specific ideas about the afterlife vary across the three
countries, including the impact of the Chinese communist government’s
crackdown on most religion and ancestral ceremonies in a way that paral-
lels the Soviet atheist campaign described by Wanner. The teachings of
organized religion are only some of the sources from which individuals
draw in constructing their personal ideas about death and about morality,
with some rejecting any notion of a supernatural world or life after death.
This is perhaps the greatest marker of how different these societies are
(especially China and Japan) from the others discussed in this part of the
book. Mathews and Kwong note that a large portion of the population is
 INTRODUCTION 13

not concerned with questions of God or the existence of a world after

death. These people are committed to maintaining a moral code for how
to live and die as a good person but do not see religion as the only possible
source of the moral code to make these judgments. In these societies,
individuals are seen as agents in defining their own identities through their
beliefs and practices. Selectively chosen religious ideas about death are
thus utilized not to maintain continuity with past lifeways, but to further
postmodern expectations to express agency and to create one’s social
identity.
Authority is thus located differently in each of the societies discussed in
this part. In Apiao, authority is found in “tradition,” and the proper ways
to deal with death require individuals to accommodate beliefs in the
agency of the dead. The authority for family and neighbors to decide
and to act is expressed in their moral behavior and successful negotiations
with these agents. In contrast, those in the western Ukraine had to
exercise their limited agency within the interstices of the power and
authority of the Soviet state and the Russian Orthodox Church, producing
new meanings of “traditional” rites and ritual items. In the postindustrial
societies of China, Japan, and the United States, rather, the ideology of
individual autonomy locates not only agency but also authority. These
chapters point to ways “traditional” ideas and practices of death may allow
individuals and local communities to craft their own responses to their
own mortality and that of others.

PERSONHOOD, MEMORY, AND TECHNOLOGY

Part II of this volume asks us to consider not only the ideas but also the
material elements of mortuary rituals. The three chapters in this part
continue an exploration of disparate cultural settings: the United States,
Bebelibe of northwestern Benin, and Acholi in Northern Uganda. They
explore the relationship between death and particular technologies: coffins
for burial, photographs of the dead, and the digital technologies behind
blogs and social networking sites that produce “digital remains.” These
chapters ask how mortuary technologies relate to notions of personhood,
the production of memory, and the authority to define these.
Merz picks up on questions of tradition introduced in Part I, explaining
that the “new times” for the Bebelibe are associated with Christianity and
with material change. Coffin burials are new or “modern,” requiring a
rectangular grave in contrast to the round burial chambers that
14 S.P. BORET ET AL.

customarily marked “good deaths.” Introduced to the region by govern-

ment and professional workers and other educated groups, who in turn are
seen as “modern,” many now find it desirable to bury inside coffins despite
the cost and what would appear to be a conflict of different understand-
ings of personal identity, death, and reincarnation. For others, however,
the customary round grave continues to be important because its con-
struction allows the animating force and identity of the deceased to leave
the grave once the body has decomposed in order to be united with a new
body. In contrast, it is believed that the closed coffins trap the animating
force and identity and impede reincarnation. A Christian understanding of
what happens at death, the immediate departure of the animating force
and identity (which, in turn, are referred to as the soul/spirit when speak-
ing French) from the body, provides an alternative explanation that elim-
inates the necessity of the round burial chamber, but one that does not
challenge the fundamental belief in reincarnation. Merz argues that new
technologies and new interpretations can exist as what she calls embellish-
ments of ideas and rituals rather than as threats to them, allowing for new
understandings to develop over time that result in different Bebelibe
versions of “new times” and of Christianity.
Merz’s concept of “embellishment” is an important one, as it suggests
that members of a society undergoing material, social, and ideological
change find it easier to accept the transformations in mortuary practices if
they see them as elaborations on existing ones rather than radical depar-
tures that challenge the authority of “tradition.” Conversely, cognizant of
a more contemporary anthropological view of culture as a set of loosely
shared orientations for communication and mutual understanding rather
than a coherent system of symbols and meanings, Merz finds that different
members of Bebelibe society, as in all societies, may hold different views
on what constitutes proper mortuary rites, and that even a single person
may hold contradictory ideas on this subject. Agency and authority thus
become more widely distributed with these embellishments while main-
taining a facade of “tradition.”
New technology allowing photographing the dead and the funeral rites
with cameras and cell phones is also a way of maintaining close ties with
the past. In Acholi, where the violence of the 1970s–2000s has created
tremendous social disruption, Seebach finds three reasons for taking death
photographs. One of these reasons is to keep the deceased’s personhood
alive for the children who may not know or remember the dead and for the
mourners to keep something of the person nearby despite his or her
 INTRODUCTION 15

corporeal absence. The photos allow these children some degree of agency
to remember the deceased and the funeral despite their youth or absence.
The elders use these photographs to create a collective memory, one that
reinforces their authority and the authority of the “Acholi way,” that is,
the “correct” way. At the same time, the photographs themselves have
social lives, a sort of agency derived from the deceased and the authority of
those who control the images to impact the social lives of those who
interact with these images.
Exploring the maintenance of blogs and social networking of the
terminally ill and their digital remains after death, Kneese argues that
although we often imagine the virtual world as immaterial, disembodied,
and autonomous, in reality, it depends on the material world of technol-
ogy, money, and labor. These virtual sites of memorialization result from
the authority of the company, which enables the communication among
the various agents: the dying person, family members and friends, and
unrelated visitors. The algorithms of digital platforms structure interac-
tions, sometimes sending unsolicited reminders to follow the deceased on
Twitter. Go Daddy, a large private Internet domain registrar, demands
payment to maintain the domain name of a blog. Although assisting with
posts to the dying person’s blog or social networking site, or maintaining
them after the person’s death may be a source of support and an expres-
sion of love, these are forms of affective labor nonetheless, done as Kneese
notes, along with changing colostomy bags and planning memorial rites.
However, the contributions of many, including those who are initially
strangers, democratically assist in the creation of the person’s digital
memory and provide a new twenty-first-century medium for communicat-
ing with the dead. They also create new arenas for contestations about
control over the deceased’s “digital remains,” based on new structures of
authority enabled by the new technology.
All three chapters in Part II shed light on the way memory, memor-
ialization, and personhood are defined, mediated, and continued after
death. As Kneese points out, anthropologists and sociologists have long
recognized that personhood is “networked,” in the sense that interac-
tions with others are needed to define, create, establish, and reinforce a
social self. That process continues beyond death as others, with varying
degrees of knowledge and authority, contribute to the collective mem-
ory of the person, the way in which the deceased continues to exist
among the living. In Bebelibe society, the individual is composed of
three elements: the physical form, the animating force, and the identity.
16 S.P. BORET ET AL.

The animating force and identity elements, that is, what makes the
person alive and unique, are linked together and so jointly reincarnate
into a union with a new body. It is the job of the survivors to make
sure, through ritual and the construction of an adequate grave, that
such a new union can happen, thus contributing to the person’s
continued existence. In contrast to pre-Christian thought where separa-
tion only occurs after the body has decomposed, the “new times” and
Christianity have introduced the notion that the animating force and
identity are a person’s soul and spirit, which leave the body immedi-
ately at death. This results in decreased concern about the type of grave
or the timely performance of ritual, creating greater focus on the festive
aspects of family reunion during dihuude celebrations that follow well
after death and burial.
In Acholi, people articulate that the photographs are taken to maintain
the personhood of the deceased, to allow those too young to remember to
know their close relative, and to allow those who cannot attend the funeral
to experience the person at his or her death. The photographs provide a
concrete object of remembrance and a material connection with the
deceased. As Seebach points out, in a region ravaged by violence, where
many of the dead have no marked burial places, their photographs serve as
surrogate or proxy graves. They are the only material objects the survivors
can keep, not only to remember their loved ones, but also to cope with their
grief. Furthermore, the elders are aware that these objects have the power to
help them construct a collective memory by documenting for the younger
generations how things have been done the “Acholi way” or how things
should be done despite years of social change, war, and destruction of
communities. Whoever controls the photographs in a sense controls the
memory of the person, of the family story, and of a former way of life. Kan
(2015: 293–319) provides an example of the way that photography has
come to challenge the authority of the clan leaders’ and elders’ control of
death rituals. He reports that picture-taking of Tlingit memorial potlatches
has become so invasive and distracting that chiefs and elders now tell
participants to refrain from video recording and photographing during
what should be the most solemn and emotional portion of the ritual.
The technology differs, but there are parallels in Americans’ use of
digitized data. Although among a wider network than kin, friends, and
neighbors, the personhood of someone who has died is discussed and
remembered, creating a post-death person. But how that story is told,
recorded, and saved for future readers is as complex as the webs of social
 INTRODUCTION 17

relationships and the technologies of American society more generally.

There is tension between democratic participation in creating a collective
memory, the companies that house the digital posts, and the family of the
deceased. Moreover, in the less personal and partially anonymous virtual
world of the postindustrial North, there is always a possibility that voyeur-
istic strangers, “death tourists,” or people falsely claiming a close relation-
ship to the deceased will participate in this process. Despite the wide
dispersal of authority in North America to define and remember the
dead, those with no ties to the deceased do not share in that cultural
legitimacy.
We need to remember when thinking about the material underpinnings
of personhood and memory that the use of various technologies comes
with real monetary costs. In a powerful critique of the American funeral
industry, Mitford (1998) accused funeral directors and others involved in
pushing high-cost funeral items such as fancy caskets on vulnerable,
grieving families. However, anthropologists working in numerous settings
have noted that vast resources for funerals are commonly expended as
survivors’ attempts to show respect for the dead and to make a claim for
the family’s moral legitimacy or/and social status (see Huntington and
Metcalf 1991; Robben 2004; and Bacchiddu and Seebach in this volume).
Likewise, the chapters in this part all note that expenses of defining and
maintaining a person’s memory (or in some cases a memory of an entire
way of life represented by that person’s funeral) may involve new costs as
well as new technologies to mark desired social status through purchasing
symbolic goods, hiring professional photographers, buying a casket, or
maintaining a digital archive. The financial cost of doing so may be
significant for family members, so that they take on debt or postpone
other expensive rituals to express the moral legitimacy of their decisions to
perform particular rites or remember in particular ways.

INDIVIDUAL, CHOICE, AND IDENTITY

Part III of the book takes up the topics of agency and authority (raised by
Kneese) in decisions about mortuary practices in affluent postindustrial
societies. In particular, they ask who makes decisions about whether the
funeral and burial practices should be the standard ones of the past or
newer alternatives that can be more personal and individualized. Recent
theorists have suggested that in modern times agency is no longer a choice
but, like individualization, an obligation. In their essay “Death of One’s Own,
18 S.P. BORET ET AL.

Life of One’s,” German sociologists Beck and Beck-Gernsheim explain that

contemporary “people are forced to conceive of themselves as do-it-yourself
producers of meaning and biography, to play a part in shaping both their own
lives and the life of society” (2001: 151). Included in this requirement is the
continuity of the production of that meaning and biography through their
own death. It will therefore come to no surprise that, as Lash puts it in his
foreword to Beck, “individualization is a fate, not a choice; in the land of
individual freedom of choice, the option to escape individualization and to
refuse participation in the individualizing game is empathetically not on the
agenda” (Lash 2001: xvi).
The chapters in this part find that in much of contemporary Japan and
the United States, what outlives the person is not a restless spirit or merely
material objects such as pictures. What seems most significant to many
people in these societies, what remains most important, is his or her
memory. This memory is not merely an ad hoc collection of individually
recollected anecdotes, but constitutes a representation of his or her social
identity based on the way the person lived, on the type of ritual and
disposal of remains he or she voiced as desirable, and on the selective
interpretations and stories that are exchanged among the living.
Boret explores these questions through his research on a type of burial
relatively new to Japan called “tree burial.” Rather than having the decea-
sed’s ashes added to those of the ancestors in a family tomb, some people
choose to have a tree as their own grave marker. Anthropologists have
pointed to the shaping of such alternatives by demographic realities, such
as not having an heir to take on the responsibilities of maintaining a family
grave (Rowe 2003; Kawano 2010; Boret 2014; Danely 2014). In this
chapter, Boret shows that this decision also reflects the identities and
relationships of the individuals who make such a choice while alive in
order to create a legacy for the survivors and a memory that will reflect
who they were. The problem here may be that the authority and agency of
family members to perform the customary rituals do not align. Rather than
considering this as an example of the individualization of mortuary ritual,
it should be seen as a way of negotiating how one will be remembered,
perhaps as a happily married couple of a nuclear family or as a woman in an
unhappy marriage who rebels against burial in her husband’s family’s
grave. He also suggests that tree burial is a means of (re)gaining control
over the representation of one’s death, which has been controlled and
standardized by the funeral industry. But this (re)appropriation is not
without some limits. The individual has agency to make choices about
 INTRODUCTION 19

what should be done with his or her body. Nonetheless, that agency is
constrained by requirements that she or he do so, the expectations of new
social ideologies to accept or renounce “traditional” burial practices, and
to create a personal identity by which to be remembered. Not to choose is
to risk not being considered a full social being (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim
2001). To choose, this part of the book argues, is to contribute to change
in the broader understanding of death in Japan.
Long and Buehring ask how that process of decision-making might
occur. What constitutes a “traditional American funeral” has changed over
time; options for mortuary ritual have expanded through a history of
immigration, industrialization, and ideological change. Exploring the per-
ceptions and experiences of American couples who come from different
religious backgrounds sheds light on the processes of interpersonal nego-
tiation and the attribution of meaning to various mortuary options. They
find that individual religious (or secular) identity, together with marital
negotiations over the course of the couple’s relationship, influences, but
does not determine, how things will be done when a person dies. The key
value voiced was that of respect, respect for the dead and respect for the
individual, which is an acknowledgment of the authority of the individual
to make decisions. The deceased’s memory, or “post-death self” (Long
and Buehring 2014) to the extent that it remains a presence in society,
may reflect the agency of the person to set the tone while alive, but is
dependent on others who have the authority to actualize, correct, and
embellish, regardless of whether the funeral and burial are “traditional” or
“alternative.” The authority of the living participants is based on the moral
claim of respect for the deceased, even when making choices that the
individual may not have voiced. They moreover suggest that in what we,
following Victor Turner, might call the liminoid experience of ritual, in
the communal taking apart of the pieces of mortuary ritual and creatively
putting them back together, these intermarried families provide alternative
models of practice that contribute to the Levi-Straussian bricolage con-
temporary U.S. mortuary practice.

LOOKING AHEAD AT THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDY OF DEATH

The chapters in this book provide not only rich ethnographic case studies,
but also bring our attention to significant questions of agency and author-
ity embedded in the production of mortuary rites and the sociocultural
process of memorialization. They collectively contribute to a more
20 S.P. BORET ET AL.

sophisticated understanding of the relationship between experiences of

continuity and change within local ideas and practices of death. How do
new concepts and technologies impact understandings of agency, and who
has the moral, political, and economic authority to perform and interpret
mortuary rituals? Ideas about the agency of the deceased are responsive to
social change. In the rural societies discussed by Bacchiddu and Wanner,
the dead ancestors unmistakably have agency since they are believed to be
capable of harming their living kin if the latter neglect them (see Straight
2006). Alternative beliefs and practices that emphasize the continuity of
identity through memory rather than the physical body are garnering
increased interest in Northern Europe, the United Kingdom, and Japan,
leading to a decline in the sociocultural centrality of physical remains in
mortuary rituals involving the physical remains. Even in these societies,
notions of the agency of the dead remain. Thus one of Kneese’s respon-
dents spoke of an uncanny feeling, comparable to seeing a ghost or
interacting with a spirit, upon encountering his late girlfriend’s pictures
on her Facebook page. Photographs, trees, or Facebook pages create and
symbolize the spiritual essences of the dead and their social agency that
their loved ones have a need to preserve.
New ideas and practices of death do not enter society as replacements
to be accepted or rejected, but provide new options in a broader field of
possibilities for agency and negotiation. They may serve as “embellish-
ments,” such as the introduction of coffins in Bebelibe towns and villages
(Merz in this volume), or turn formerly and relatively insignificant ritual
items into potent symbols of modern nationalism as with the hand-
embroidered towels used in western Ukrainian mortuary rites (Wanner
in this volume). Change may loosen the authority of specialists, as has
occurred in affluent societies like Japan or the United States (Mathews and
Kwong, Kneese, Boret, Long and Buehring in this volume) as people
combine elements of different practices, for example, a conservative
church funeral, a green burial, and a digital cemetery. But new ideologies
and technologies can also be used to reinforce claims to authority as
among Acholi elders (Seebach in this volume), or may replace one power-
ful central agent with an even more powerful one, for example, the control
by the Soviet state over the Greek Orthodox Church in western Ukraine.
As important as these new technologies and ideas are for an under-
standing of sociocultural change in death practices, the anthropology of
death would also do well to consider more explicitly the role of human
emotion. Although the experience of dying or of the death of another
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