Death and Dying in Colonial Spanish America

From the Here to the Hereafter: An Introduction to Death and Dying

1 From the Here to the Hereafter An Introduction to Death and Dying martina will de chaparro and miruna achim in 1955, social anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer published a short essay titled “The Pornography of Death,” in which he likened Victorian sexual taboos to the modern western attitude toward death.1 Death behind closed doors, unexamined and undiscussed, had created a new set of sanctions concerning what could and could not be felt and/or expressed. According to this influential essay, in the modern western world, death is our sex—an equation that became popular in thanatological literature. “Concern about death,” echoed psychologist Herman Feifel in a 1960 Time interview, “has been relegated to the tabooed territory heretofore occupied by diseases like tuberculosis and cancer, and the topic of sex.”2 Both the subsequent popular and scholarly literature reverberated with this contention, which became axiomatic: contemporary western society shuns and fears death. Feifel’s The Meaning of Death propelled this idea further into the mainstream and received reinforcement 2 will de chaparro and achim from successive publications by Gorer and British journalist Jessica Mitford, each of whom attested to the parallel phenomena in the United States and Britain.3 After visiting funeral homes and hospitals , conducting interviews, and otherwise investigating the topic, Gorer and Mitford separately declared, essentially, that death and its messy accoutrements had been banished from modern life to the extent that people had figured out how to do so. Though differing in their focal points—Mitford’s critique, for example, centered on the funeral industry’s thorough exploitation of the bereaved— these abuses rested on the popular culture’s systematic resistance to facing death even as it lavished the dead with increasingly elaborate and pricey mortuary treatments, caskets, and burial liners. The resultant uproar led to funeral industry reforms in the United States and helped propel the modern hospice movement in Britain and elsewhere. A decade later, Ernest Becker went on to explain our fears in The Denial of Death, receiving a posthumous Pulitzer Prize and further inscribing this truism in the popular mind. Psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross powerfully challenged all of this death-denial through her teaching and publications, famously inviting terminally ill people into her classroom to share their thoughts on dying with her students. She assured readers in On Death and Dying that the host of emotions accompanying mourning was—despite societal pressures to deny these, too—in fact, a quite normal facet of grief.4 Scholars took note of psychologists’ and journalists’ derisive indictment of the modern prudishness and cult of denial, and a literature formed around the legal, social, medical, and historical aspects of death. If we had become more “enlightened’ than the Victorians about sexuality by studying it and endlessly talking about it, then surely we could become more enlightened about death and dying by making it the focus of a similar project. French historians of the mentalit é school in particular embraced the topic and hoped to uncover the problem’s historical roots. Especially notable among them were Michel Vovelle and Philippe Ariès, who took different approaches but similarly sought to define and trace the premodern French attitude toward death.5 Vovelle elaborated the concept of “dechristianization ” to explain the declining pious bequests he observed in wills from eighteenth-century Provence. As people moved away from the early modern sensibility toward a more enlightened one, their wills’ Introduction 3 concern with public display and ceremony surrendered to a more inward-looking piety and a greater optimism. Employing a dizzying array of artistic and literary sources, Ariès’s model, on the other hand, took up an extremely broad range of social phenomena and made liberal extrapolation from primarily elite French and British sources to the whole of western society, claiming to show that a fundamental shift had taken place in popular perceptions of death in the modern period. Seductive as his lucid and seamless packaging of the problem was, the generalizations and assumptions he made in his magnum opus, The Hour of Our Death, pointed to the enormous scope of work remaining. Notwithstanding its weaknesses, this important early scholarship eloquently articulated many of the questions that subsequent scholars would likewise pose for different regions, populations, and periods. Furthermore, the French research offered the historian important methodological models to show how the social sense of death is constructed, while demonstrating its centrality in the way people live and think...