Mortuary Rites

Rites or rituals as described by some authors are common features in all human societies. They consist of gestures and words dedicated to an object, such as a person, group of people, an occasion, or a material thing, of which the sacred character is acknowledged in a given human community. This kind of behavior should be distinguished from mere perfunctory conduct, as prescribed by codes, for instance. Rituals are met at all levels of the social order, within small arenas as well as society at large. For most sociologists and anthropologists, the function of rituals is to secure a certain mastery of temporality: The same gestures, words, or songs give the impression that time always goes through the same common places. This is the collective way of responding to the need for “ontological security,” as defined by Anthony Giddens.

The occasion of death is of course one of the main anchorages of ritual behavior, be it for an individual, a small collection of people, or a vast gathering of people. This behavior is related to two outstanding social duties toward both the deceased and the bereaved. There is first the duty of saying farewell to the dead, and second, the duty of welcoming the dead in the realm of the dead. In a much-celebrated work, Arnold van Gennep sketched the general outlines of all “rites of passage,” valid in principle for all kinds of human societies. Resorting to various stage sequences, the aim is to bestow upon an individual or sometimes a collection of individuals a new identity leading to a new condition. This is true of all the great events in one's life, like birth, initiation, marriage, enthronement, and death. Those rites follow a tripartite pattern: A first sequence underlines the separation of the individual from his or her group of belonging; a second one aims at placing him or her at the margin, figuring in this manner his or her transitory status; and a final one integrates the individual into a new status. Of course, this pattern is subject to many variations according to the huge display of cultural contexts within the human order of things.

In a seminal chapter of his famous book The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Emile Durkheim makes use of the words “piaculary rites,” indicating that the origin of these rites lies in the idea of expiation. But the meaning of the term is broader: “Any misfortune, anything that is of bad omen, anything inspiring feelings of anguish or of dread calls necessarily for a piaculum, and, by consequence, is called piaculary.” Therefore, bereavement represents one example of piaculary rites. Durkheim then distinguishes between rites of pure abstention and rites of ceremony, the first pertaining to his notion of negative cult and the second, positive cult. Abstention, for example, means it is forbidden to mention the dead person's name, to stay at the place where the death occurred, or to deal with foreigners. The reason for such prohibitions lies in the sacred character of the dead, that is, his or her body. All that is or has been related to it finds itself, by contagion, in a religious state that excludes any contact with the things of the secular realm.

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