Start Date
4-26-2023 9:00 AM
Disciplines
History
Subjects
death ritual, funerary rite, burial practices, spirituality, death, existentialism, logical positivism
Abstract
Death ritual is a nearly ubiquitous aspect of life within civilization, and serves the purpose of reconciling the logical positivist societal constructions that uphold social order with the fundamentally logic-breaking nature of death. This paper posits that death ritual serves as a strong cross-cultural unit of analysis as it provides insight into the defining socio-cultural traits and spiritual outlooks of different cultures. This unit of analysis is applied to Song-era Ch’an Buddhism, pre-colonial Hindu India, and Maori death ritual. For each of these examples, death rites are connected to aspects of art, culture, social organization, and spirituality or religion, and they are examined in relation to one another. The paper concludes with a further analysis of the consistent role death ritual plays in maintaining positivist social systems while being adapted to the disparate cultural needs of a given society.
Creative Commons License or Rights Statement
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/39776
Included in
Rite to Death, Left to Life: Death Ritual as a Cross-Cultural Unit of Analysis
Death ritual is a nearly ubiquitous aspect of life within civilization, and serves the purpose of reconciling the logical positivist societal constructions that uphold social order with the fundamentally logic-breaking nature of death. This paper posits that death ritual serves as a strong cross-cultural unit of analysis as it provides insight into the defining socio-cultural traits and spiritual outlooks of different cultures. This unit of analysis is applied to Song-era Ch’an Buddhism, pre-colonial Hindu India, and Maori death ritual. For each of these examples, death rites are connected to aspects of art, culture, social organization, and spirituality or religion, and they are examined in relation to one another. The paper concludes with a further analysis of the consistent role death ritual plays in maintaining positivist social systems while being adapted to the disparate cultural needs of a given society.