![]() It is something that developed culturally over time. There is little evidence that the question of what a good death is occurred in early human hunter-gatherer societies. That’s the kind of explanation evolutionary anthropologists give, anyway.” A good death? A funeral means we aren’t just disposing of a corpse as if it were nothing. This contradiction may be why we surround death with pomp (dramatic displays) and ceremony. We are therefore torn between needing to dispose of a corpse that might bear germs and wanting to hold on to the body that is still recognisable as belonging to someone we have known and loved. Not only do they represent reminders of our mortality, but can also be sources of infectious disease. “We’ve evolved to avoid physical threats, which is partly why corpses repulse us. We need these rituals, says Dr Jong, because our feelings about death can be ambivalent (mixed). ![]() Rituals may have evolved to help us deal with death. These practices may seem normal to us, but bizarre to others. Perhaps some people might think dressing a corpse - even performing cosmetic surgery on it as American undertakers are often expected to do - is strange? Increasingly in the UK too, dead bodies are drained of their natural fluids and filled with embalming liquid to preserve them. “Again, at first glance, this may look to us like cavalier (casual) abandonment, but there is nothing cavalier about building costly structures just for the dead,” explains Dr Jong.Īll cultures care about dead bodies but they care in different ways. Similarly, in Ancient Persia (now Iran) some tribes like the Zoroastrians, used to build towers of silence where they placed their dead to be eaten by birds. “But when you think how hard it is to carry a dead body up a mountain, it becomes clear that it’s a deliberate and meaningful act,” says Dr Jong. For some, this may sound rather heartless. In some parts of Tibet, corpses are left on a mountain rather than buried. For them, death comes in stages,” says Dr Jong. They speak of a person not being properly dead until the second burial. For example, in some parts of Indonesia, families dig up the bodies of their dead relatives and rebury them. So is death the brain or the heart stopping? What about if someone has a terminal illness and parts of their bodies die before they do as organs shut down and stop working? “When you start to think about this across different cultures, the question gets even bigger. Even in scientific communities, there is not complete agreement on this.” “There are rituals around death that can vary enormously across different cultures but there can also be different definitions of what death is. It may seem strange to ask this but the first question we need to address is what death actually is, says Dr Jonathan Jong from the Institute for Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford.
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