Abstract
The Emerald Publishing’s Funerary International Series is a fascinating new perspective on the cultural study of Death, Dying, and Disposal, as the field is called in the United Kingdom. In the USA we don’t include Disposal. We tend to think of funerals and memorials as an aspect of grief. Perhaps as this series grows and bereavement studies continues to move beyond its present psychological base, scholarship in the US can include more of the interesting world of Disposal.
The series is edited by Julie Rugg who is also the author with Brian Parsons of the book on England and Wales. In the short description of the series in the front matter of each book, she says that the expanding scholarly work in death and dying is missing “a repository of basic facts about funeral practices in each country and the broader legal, governance, and denominational frameworks for those practices, which might serve to set more detailed research in context.” Rugg says the series’ goal is to create such a repository.
The series has four books so far on England and Wales, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, and Serbia. I read all of them for this review. The series website says a book on Finland is forthcoming and has a link for potential authors to propose a book on a different country. The potential is almost endless.
The geographic range is now from the British Isles to the Balkans. If the range were expanded east to Greece, then into the old Ottoman Empire, onto the Silk Road, or across the Mediterranean and follow the Nile to its headwaters and beyond, the diversity could become overwhelming, but scholars equipped to find patterns would be in a position to radically expand our understanding of both how we dispose of the bodies, why we do it the ways we do, and how disposal fits into larger cultural patterns. And that would, in turn, give us new perspectives on how humans regard and manage death.
It will be interesting to see how well Rugg’s framework holds up as the repository grows beyond European practices. In my own examination of the Western model of grief, for example, a detailed study of Japanese ancestor rituals proved to be a good lens through which to study the response to significant deaths in North America and Western Europe. In Japan, attendants take the tray with the dead person’s remains out of the crematorium. Then family members pick up the pieces with chop sticks and put them into an urn that will be placed in a large grave with other family who have died. The rituals continue for 35 to 50 years, until the dead have been integrated into the generalized family dead, at which time their tablet is moved from the Buddha altar in the home to the kami shelf, that is from the more personal Buddhist part of Japanese religion to the less personal Shinto part. I had a hard time trying to fit what I know about funerary in Japan into Rugg’s framework. But Rugg has given us a good start that can assimilate studies of more funerary practices and then accommodate to the additional data.
The authors of the four books published so far in the series are knowledgeable scholars from the culture that they describe. They write clear and concise accounts of areas Rugg has delineated. Rugg is obviously a good editor, although she takes none of the credit she deserves. The English is very good. I never had to read a sentence twice. The books have interesting accounts of changes and continuities over the last century and a half, detailed reports on the laws and regulations governing the disposal of bodies, the various combinations of public and private ownership of graves and funeral services, costs, and occasionally problems families encounter.
The authors all cover the topics Rugg lays out for them. That means scholars interested in particular topics can easily focus on those parts of each book to begin to formulate the questions that will lead them to expand on the study. Each book has a good selected bibliography at the end that will be an excellent starting point for further comparative studies. I really had not thought about how many political issues and cultural values intersect with what we do with bodies and the rituals by which we transition the living person to a dead one. Issues include public health policies, environmental concerns, certifications of professions, and what to do about families who illegally dispose of their dead. The question of what does government supply and what comes from private sources must be answered many times, especially in the books on Serbia and the Czech Republic where we see how history has left its mark on funerary.
The books also give good, if brief, descriptions of the religious traditions that prescribe the rituals and prohibitions of disposal. Between the lines, we find differences in how religions function in cultural identity, for example, in the strong sense of nationalism that had been suppressed for centuries in Serbia, or the more the more casual sense that religion is an individual choice in the Netherlands.
In short, I think Rugg has accomplished her goal of creating a repository information on funerary practices and the legal, cultural, historical, and religious contexts in which the funeral practices were developed, changed, and maintained over the last century and a half. She has given future scholars in the field a potentially valuable resource. We will have to wait to see how well scholars use these resources and what directions scholarship will take as a result.
My suggestion to Omega readers, who seem mostly content to keep their work within their own culture, is to read one of these books when you make plans to travel. The books can serve as a thanatological travel guide. You will find in each of them a far superior and concise history of the last 150 years than I have seen in most travel guides.
In the UK and Netherlands, changes have been reasonably smooth. In the Czech Republic and Serbia, changes have been jarring. The great-grandparents of people today remembered the fall of both the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, and in the history covered by all these books, adults still remember the British and Soviet empires. The rise and fall of Marxism left differing imprints on the funerary of both Serbia and the Czech Republic. If you visit a cemetery after you have read one of these book, you will understand that country better than what you might learn at the standard tourist attractions.
Footnotes
Editor’s Note
Dennis Klass, PhD, is the co-author of Dead but not Lost: Grief Narratives in Religious Traditions, co-editor of Continuing Bonds in Bereavement: New Directions for Research and Practice, and Billiards Chair at Collington/Kendal Episcopal Life Care Community, Mitchellville, MD, United States.