DEATH IN A CULTURAL PROSPECTIVE

DEATH AND TAXES ARE UNAVOIDABLE

But Hell, you can refuse to pay your taxes.

When you live next to a cemetery you cannot weep for everyone

Old Russian Proverb

The death industry in our culture is not to service the dead; but, its purpose is to exploitate the grief and to play on the guilt of family members of the deceased in order to bilk them for as much money as possible. This is a billion dollar industry that never has a recession.



There is the transportation to the funeral home, the embalming (now that’s a macabre business,) clothing, setting the hair, makeup, the coffin (that can cost as much as a small car – or a Mercedes if you’ve got the cash,) the viewing, the service, the trip to the cemetery, the plot and perhaps a wake. $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Though some of this may seem necessary, it is all done by someone else – for pay. It is impersonal, and as a result it does not lend to closure.

In our culture we don’t want to be involved with the dead anymore than necessary. There is an unhealthy attitude of dread, disgust and fear attached to the dead – regardless to how close we were to the deceased. Especially for kids, in a time of mass media zombies and vampires, being forced to see a dead person is scary as hell.

They're comming to get you Barbara...

Death rituals in different cultures may seem bizarre when viewed from our removed cloistered and cultural mindset, but what is considered normal is a matter of cultural perspective.

In Athabascan Indian villages throughout Alaska, death is viewed as a natural passing. Native people grieve for their lost but they do not have the fear and revulsion of the dead that exist in our society.

Athabascan villages are matriarchal societies: the clan is counted through the mother line. When a death occurs, the women of the extended family bathe and clothe the dead, the men build a coffin which is then decorated by the women. The coffin and body is placed open in the living area of the home, and for the next few days (until the day of the funeral) the whole village comes to visit and to show concern and support for the family.

Beginning the day of the death the family of the deceased is expected to prepare breakfast, lunch and supper for the entire village. The extended family chips in with food and provisions but the preparation and serving is done by the women and children of the immediate family. Visitors come and fill their plates and sit and eat and talk in the room with the body, while the adults and children of the household are busy with the preparation and serving of food and the cleaning up. People, including children, come and go all day and into the night.

There is a constant vigil of the body and the house is always full of people talking and laughing, drinking tea or coffee, and recounting memories of the deceased. The body is never left alone.

By the day of the funeral the family of the deceased is exhausted. There is a Christian funeral of some denomination in a village church or hall before the coffin and body are buried ( In the far arctic the bodies are often kept frozen, either in the village or at Fairbanks, until the ground can thaw enough for the final burial and grave side service.)

Grave yard in an Athabascan village.

After the body is buried there is one more service to be performed: usually a potlatch is held.

A potlatch is a ceremonial get together and feeding of the entire village. Butcher block paper is rolled out on the floor of the village hall or meeting place. People bring their own plates and silverware and sit on the floor or on chairs on each side of the paper. The extended family, or group giving the potlatch, served moose head soup, wild meats, pasta salads, berry deserts and other cultural delicacies. Often at funeral potlatches guns, bandanas, and clothing are given away as gifts to the people attending. Potlatches always end with elders speaking or lecturing the assembled; and, at certain celebrative potlatches there is Indian singing and dancing. (It is worth noting that at one time the government, at the urging of churches, outlawed potlatches.)


You have heard that it takes a village to raise a child. It also takes a village to bury the dead.


The Athabascan death ritual may seem strange or even bizarre when viewed from our cultural perspective. But the village has its own culture. In the village death is a natural occurrence and dead bodies are not feared. The body of the deceased (we seem to prefer that word to dead) is prepared and viewed and honored by the family prior to the funeral; and by the time of the funeral the family is exhausted from its obligation and homage to the passed family member. There has been support from the entire village, exhaustive labor and there is personal, family closure.



In my next and last post on death and culture I will discuss the handling of death in the Yup’ik Eskimo villages of southwest Alaska.

the Ol'Buzzard

ALASKAN NATIVE CULTURE - ATHABASCAN

I wanted to continue my post on DEATH and how it is viewed differently by different cultures.   The only other cultures I have been submersed in, other than my own, are the Indian and Eskimo cultures of Alaska.

For eleven years my wife and I taught school in the remote interior villages.   Before I can discuss the way death is dealt with in these cultures I first have to give a little background on the cultures themselves.

All native cultures are not the same.   They have different languages, different traditions and different spiritual beliefs – and they do not like each other. The Athabascan (sometimes spelled Athapascan) Indians of the Interior were never subjugated by the “white man.”   In the traditional villages they are a proud and somewhat defiant people who do not take well to outsiders.   A village is a third world country that operates within its own set of cultural norms.   There is a high incident of drug and alcoholism - child and spousal abuse.   When my wife and I went into our first village, where we taught for seven years, we were made to feel as outsiders.   The villagers spoke of “white man” as the cause of all their problems and the root of all the shortcomings of the village.

It took about three years for the village to get comfortable with our presence and accept us as “their teachers,” though we were never fully accepted.

Truthfully, the villages have a good reason for their prejudice against “white man” and the government, which they identify as one and the same.   Until recently the government through the Department of Indian Affairs had a heavy hand when dealing with the villages; and as might be expected Christianity has done its share of exploitation.   In Sally Carrighar’s book Moonlight at Midday she describes how the Christian missionaries running the school in a costal Yup’ik Eskimo village railed against women being topless in their homes, which was the accepted custom.   Now, years later, the villages are permeated with a mixture of Christianity and shaman beliefs.

The Stick Dance to placate or communicate with the dead.

Jackson

In Alaskan Native history we find a perfect example of the evils of a consolidation of Church and State. At the turn of the century, Sheldon Jackson, a Presbyterian minister cum missionary working in Alaska, was placed in charge of Alaska Native education by the Federal Government. Jackson’s idea was to assimilate the Native cultures by creating white Christian clones of the Natives.   He divided up Alaska into school districts and assigned a district to each of the Protestant faiths requiring they set up missionary schools that would discourage Native traditions and teach white Christian values.   Later Jackson established a series of boarding schools and forced many Native children to leave the village and attend his schools.   At the schools, children from different villages and different Native cultures were mixed together, and speaking their Native languages was forbidden and resulted in corporal punishment.

Over the succeeding decades many Native students lost their language and cultural identity.   This condition continued until 1972 when Molly Hootch vs. the State of Alaska and the results of the 1976 Tobeluk Consent Decree declared Native children had the same right as white children to have public education available in their home villages.   Many parents and grandparents, who had children in school, were the product of these boarding school educations and harbored great resentment.

Though there are churches in all the villages, the people still cling to many traditional beliefs, and these beliefs can very greatly from village to village.   In our village children were told if they became lost Raven would guide them back to safety.   Men believed animals could understand human language; if a man showed up at his uncles house with a gun it was understood he wants to hunt: If he asks his uncle to go hunting the animals would hear and hide. Girls were told to bare their breast if they encounter a bear while berry picking and when the bear recognized they were female it would not feel threatened.   The potlatch was the center of traditional cultural participation.



Children learning Native Dance from their elders in preparation for Potlatch.



A potlatch is a ceremonial feed, complete with singing and dancing, that involves the whole village.   The potlatch is modified for different occasions including honoring a distinguished visitor, marriage, celebrating a particular village member or event, communicating with the dead and for, of course, funerals.

In my next post I will describe the death traditions in the interior Athabascan villages

THE SUBJECT NO ONE WANTS TO TALKABOUT

Back to the HOKEY POKEY

I know that people don’t care to sit down and read long post.   Like everything else in this time of computers, twitter and cell phones, people want to read a few paragraph from a blog they are following, make a comment and then move on to the next post.

For this reason I have decided to breach the subject of DEATH in two or even three installments.

"The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far from being on a cruise ship.   Most of your time is spent lying on your back.  The brain has shut down.   The flesh begins to soften.  Nothing much new happens and nothing is esxpected of you." 

STIFF, by Mary Roach

I recently attended the funeral of my wife’s aunt.  It is not the first funeral I have attended, but the first commercial funeral I have attended in a long time.   That funeral and my approaching birthday (no. 72) have me rethinking about death; and how death is handled by different cultures and how it is perceived by different individuals.   As I have said before: Death is the final debt we owe to nature for our time alive on this earth – but that’s bull shit.   I don’t question so much why I must die; but the real question seems to be why have I lived?

The only answer I can surmise seems to be that at some random point in time, one of the millions of sperms in one of my fathers random ejaculations (who ever the hell he was) happened to connect with a random egg passing through my mothers uterus.  The whole thing seems perfectly random: I am here via the butterfly effect described in the Chaos Theory.   I am a random male, that had a random birth, that has made random choices in life, that has led me to be a random old man, expecting a random death at sometime in the random future.

Without getting any more metaphysical than that, in the following post I will write about how death is handled in our culture, and how it differs from the death rituals I experienced while living in the Indian and Eskimo villages of Alaska.

But first a little background.

From the earliest times death has been feared and misunderstood by man.   Early humans left their dead for the animals and the environment to consume, as evident by early archeological finds.   Early man was fearful of the unknown, fearful of death and fearful of the dead; and somewhere along his cognitive development the idea of gods and ghost and an afterlife evolved.

Early Neanderthal burial vaults have been discovered that contained weapons and personal artifacts, evidence of a belief in an afterlife.   Pharoses of Egypt were entombed with riches, personal belongings and even slaves.   Michael Crichton describes a Viking funeral pyre in his book Eaters of the Dead in which all preparations were made for the Viking chief’s journey to Valhalla. (Though fiction, Crichton researched his material thoroughly.)

Now we have the advent of major religions and their drive to take control of death



Ars Moriendi (The art of dying), a Latin text dating about 1415, contains woodblock prints presenting the Christians’ dilemma at the time of death.  



The dying man is surrounded on one side by the demons of hell and on the other side by saints and angles.   A battle is in progress for the dying man’s soul.   The only chance this man has is for the last rites to be administered in order to purify his soul so that he might be received sinless by the body of angles.   Early Catholics feared the prospect of sudden death because dying unconsecrated could result in being abducted by demons into the inferno of hell.

The early Catholic Church, with its doctrine of purgatory, was able to manipulate huge financial benefit from the policy of priest receiving money to pray to the saints for the deceased’s speedy trip through purgatory.  The more someone paid the more prayers the priest would offer – thus insuring the rich man a prominent place in the heavenly realm.

(Side note: even today the Catholic Church is one of the biggest individual owners of funeral homes in the city of New York – again profiting from death.)

Notice the early church was all about men going to heaven – the Christian church has never be overly concerned about women, other then to pose them as wanton, temptresses, debasers of men and the cause of original sin.

The image of The Church as the protector from death was lain bare during the mid-14th century when the Black Death swept through Europe, killing perhaps half the Continent’s population.   During that time traditional burial customs collapsed as most victims were consigned to mass graves.   It has been claimed that not only the dead, but also the dying were buried in public pits in an attempt to stem the contagion.

Today death is a big business.   Funeral homes are never short of business and they prey on the grief of surviving family members to sell the biggest and most elaborate death ritual the family can afford.   Cemetery lots increase the value of land from cost per acre to cost per square foot.   Massive cemeteries blanket our country and tie up valuable land from productive use for the many centuries to come.

The dead in our culture are feared and considered an unnatural macabre spectacle to be endured, avoided and dispensed with as fast as possible.   Death is a damn profitable business, and the major recruiting tool for religions of the world.

I know reading a post about death is a bummer - but maybe it can help you

LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE OF LIFE



The Ol'Buzzard

DEATH AND FUNERALS

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