On Our Way: The Final Passage through Life and Death

5. Corpsed Persons

F I V E d CORPSED PERSONS “Funerals are for the living, not the dead.” This glib statement is often heard and is often incomplete and dismissive. In many instances, funerals have been for the dead as well as the living. Many peoples have developed core religious beliefs and practices around the fate and well-being of the dead. What does it mean to be a corpse? Where has the person gone? How should we deal with the physical remains? What special precautions should we take—for the sake of both the dead and ourselves? In this chapter I focus on the corpsed person, the central figure in funeral and memorialization rituals. We will see that human remains are variously treated as trophies,identity markers,and devices for communicating with the gods or working magic spells.We will meet corpsed people who can cure and others who can kill us.Through it all,through all the changes that have been wrought in the history of the human race, we will keep our eyes on what the corpsed person is still becoming as we move further into the third millennium. This person is dead. By that, I mean the person we have known. The person who walked and talked, who toiled and loafed, quarreled and loved, suffered and enjoyed. The motionless, unresponsive body that remains seems but an empty shell. Where is our friend now? We are left with the same questions that survivors have always faced: What should be done with the physical remains? How should we interpret this death—and all deaths? How should we remember this person, and how should we go on now that this person is no longer with us? 1 3 8 Most cultures have come up with answers to these questions. Rituals were developed to affirm, perform, and perpetuate these answers. Anthropologists have been trying to puzzle out the resemblances and differences among peoples living in different parts of the world. In the meantime , traditional societies have been swept up in massive social, technological , and ecological change. The old ways may continue to have much of their appeal and some of their power, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep a people united in their deathways when all about them is melting away. As elders chant an ancient funerary prayer, the young may be listening to hip-hop on headphones; as the women of one family assemble to wash and dress a corpse with their own hands, those of another family watch stoically as a van drives off to the commercial funeral establishment. The winds of change are blowing across the graveyard. Ambiguity, uncertainty, and conflict increase as cultures collide, split, merge, and split again. We take up one important element in this process: the corpsed person . This will not tell the whole story, but it will help to develop an informed perspective on the final passage. ABOUT BONES When those bones were walking around, they made up only about a tenth of the total body weight. Nevertheless, bones are mostly what endures after the early phases of corpsehood. There are a few striking exceptions . Extreme cold slows bacterial action and thereby delays or even inhibits putrefaction. Occasionally an intact body is found many years after death. We have had recent examples. Medical researchers worked hard at trying to find intact corpses of victims of the killer influenza pandemic that raged in 1918.1 Despite strenuous efforts, the results were disappointing. It does not take much earth warming for a body to deteriorate quickly, even in the tundra. Nevertheless, it was clear that some bodies were relatively intact while others had pretty much been reduced to bones. “Iceman” and the “Ice Maiden” are among the most remarkable people to have emerged from the frigid grasp of death.2 He was a thirty-year-old hunter whose frozen body was discovered after five thousand years of residence on an Alpine slope. Cause of death is not on record, but the arC O R P S E D P E R S O N S / 1 3 9 rowhead found in his body has raised suspicions in some quarters. “Otzi”’s body was well preserved, down to the elaborate tattoos.Also in good shape were his leather clothes, copper ax, and quiver of arrows. The Ice Maiden was a girl found on a mountain peak in Peru, where she...