Death Rituals

Anthropological Perspectives of Death Ritual

The study of death-related beliefs and practices has been of crucial importance to anthropology from its beginning. In archaeology, remnants from burials are often the only data surviving from early paleolithic cultures. They have provided evidence of cultural activities for the world's oldest civilizations and religious practice of prehistoric people. Mortuary structures have produced impressive and revealing evidence about ancient ways of life. The huge pyramids in Egypt and the magnificent tombs in Greece and China have yielded a plethora of information about the ideologies and values of ancient societies in those countries.

In sociocultural anthropology, interest in death-related beliefs and practices can be traced to the cultural evolutionists of the 19th century who attempted to construct grand evolutionary schemes of social development in the world. Edward Tylor and Sir James Frazer, for example, focused their attention on beliefs associated with death and existence thereafter. They argued that early humans' contemplation of death and deathlike states, such as sleeping and dreaming, was the origin of the concept of the soul [Page 715]and that the belief in its continued existence after death lead to the origin of all religions.

The evolutionary approach of Tylor, Frazer, and others has been discredited because of its ethnocentric scheme of universal cultural evolution, its faulty use of the comparative method, and its unsupported speculations concerning the origin of various institutions, beliefs, and practices. However, the subject of death-related behaviors continued to play an important role in the anthropological study of religion. In the 20th century, anthropologists interested in the study of religion shifted their attention from its origins and evolution to the study of basic functions that religion serves in human society. The functional approach to religion had its origin in the works of French sociologist Durkheim, developed further in the works of his students such as Robert Hertz, and in the works of British social anthropologists such as Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski. These functionalists, through the analysis of death-related behaviors, attempted to demonstrate how a religious system serves to affirm and preserve the social system by establishing equilibrium and maintaining social solidarity.

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