Douglas J. Davies

Encyclopedia of cremation

Contents: Introduction A-Z Entries Cremation statistics Chronology of cremation Cremation Society Archive Sources Select bibliography Index.

Emotion, identity, and religion : hope, reciprocity, and otherness

Introduction 1. Dynamics, feelings, and meanings 2. Ritual, values, and emotions 3. Identity depletion 4. Grief, intensive living, and charisma 5. Gender, identity, and purity 6. Love, mercy, humility, and betrayal 7. Merit, grace, and pardon 8. Moral-somatics, hope, despair, and suffering 9. Revelation, conversion, and spirit power 10. Sacred place, worship, and music Conclusion Bibliography

The sacred crematorium

In this paper I consider ways in which one contemporary institution, the modern crematorium, may, increasingly, be helping to foster a sense of the sacred. Though conceived largely as an exercise in the history and phenomenology of religion the discussion also includes some empirical material from Britain which is interpreted anthropologically. The conclusion is more speculative and echoes earlier, and once fashionable, theories of the origin of religion which related the sense of the sacred to reported experiences of the dead.

CLASSICS REVISITED Robert Hertz: The social triumph over death

Robert Hertz’ s foundational contribution to the sociology of death is as strikingly fresh today as when ® rst published in 1907 when Hertz, born in 1881 and killed in active service in 1915, was but 26 years old. It remained largely unknown to English speaking social science for some 50 years and increased in signi® cance only after its English translation of 1960. It now stands as a basic historical and key theoretical reference point for sociological work on death. It appeared ® rst in the Anne e Sociologique, a journal established to propagate the theoretical perspective of a small number of sociologists associated with Emile Durkheim, including Marcel Mauss, Henri Hubert and Hertz. They emphasised `collective representations’ , i.e., patterns of ideas, values, beliefs and behavioural expectations that emerged from the interplay of many individuals over time and provided the distinctive domain of and for sociology. Because collective representations could not be reduced to any single emotion of individuals they could not be appropriately studied by psychology, only by sociology. This means that, while we may, quite legitimately, expect the Anne e scholars to refer to emotions, we will expect to ® nd the emotions interpreted sociologically, in terms of collective representations, and not psychologically. In other words, they are interested in what the emotions mean to people within a social world and not what the emotions mean within the private domain of an individual self. The way sociological and psychological disciplines relate continues to be discussed to the present day. Hertz focused on social values as they were grounded in the human body and, in a later generation, his work would have fallen under the broad category

Sociology, mortality and solidarity. An Interview with Zygmunt Bauman on death, dying and immortality

In offering a Mortality-focused foreword to Michael Hviid Jacobsen’s valuable interview with the distinguished sociologist Zygmunt Bauman on, ‘death, dying and immortality’, I want to speak of boundaries, imagination and of older age. Boundaries are relevant because their negative capacity often divides knowledge into isolated academic domains with many sociologists paying scant attention to issues of death. It was interesting, for example, that in a three-page interview with Bauman for the British Sociological Association’s newsletter, the issue of death is entirely absent even though the ‘sad death of Pierre Bourdieu’ becomes the occasion for comment on that scholar’s role as a public intellectual in France (Blackshaw, 2002). And it is with an eye to such intellectual activity that ‘boundaries’ link with the theme of ‘imagination’, one that also has a place in the BSA interview with its allusion to a ‘sociological sixth sense’. Bauman glosses this with the statement that ‘learning sociological methods may guarantee a job, but not wisdom and insight’ (p. 2). He explains that he has learned much from insightful novelists even when compared with the books of oft quoted sociological authorities. Here his commitment to a ‘sociological imagination’ raises an intriguing question over the role of ‘imagination’, not only in our creative work within the detail of our usual academic boundaries or professional vocation but also in our shared ventures across disciplines. And it is just such an imagination that our Mortality journal has sought to expand through its exploration of many approaches to death in its articles, invited special editions and in its alliance with the Death,

The Social Facts of Death

All societies use their cultural values to transform bare biological facts of life including death and emotion into images and motifs representing ideals which sociologists sometimes call ‘social facts’ (Thomas 1976: 158). In this chapter, three different perspectives are taken towards contemporary British ideas of death and emotion, firstly through the eyes of the media which have given death a high profile, secondly through surveys of people’s actual experience, and thirdly through an anthropological analysis of the process of cremation and of grief.

Geographies of the Spirit World

Most human cultures possess spaces for spirits understood as person-like powers capable of human interaction. While this may sound paradoxical, since spirits are typically deemed not to occupy a ‘space’ as do living persons, it becomes more intelligible once we recognise that ‘life’ itself is a mysterious entity difficult to ‘place’ or restrict to a body. This chapter will show how different societies classify their world and account for this interplay between life forces and the material nature of things is reflected in the way they make spaces for spirits.

Symbolic Thought and Religious Knowledge

Recent anthropological and psychological studies suggest a distinctive mode of symbolic thinking which questions the structure of Piagets scheme and which raises important theological issues. Here Sperbers key hypothesis that symbolic data of diverse kinds are integrated into a single system within the individual is applied in two directions: that of religious experience and biblical interpretation, and that of exposure to new ritual phenomena and comparative religion.

Classics revisited: Death, immortality, and Sir James Frazer

Sir James Frazer (1854–1941), prolific Victorian-Edwardian British anthropologist whose comparative mythology The Golden Bough is still in print, collected much material on death. Here we consider his three volume, The belief in immortality and the worship of the dead (1913, 1922, 1924/1968). Another significant collection, The fear of the dead in primitive religion (1934, 1936), will only be alluded to but would also repay closer study. Famed in his day for advocating the new subject of anthropology, with a brief biography by Downie (1940) and a splendidly full one by Ackerman (1987), his immense accumulation and ordering of material on human attitudes to death and the practice of funerary rites has tended to be ignored due to rapid changes of theoretical fashion in anthropology throughout the twentieth century. Yet, his work remains as one foundation upon which to approach the human engagement with death. In exemplary prose, The belief in immortality and the worship of the dead described and interpreted funeral rites, human beliefs in the continuity of souls after death, and their transformation into powerful divine-like entities, perhaps even into the idea of God. It embraced the ideological and material culture of death of indigenous peoples in Australia, the Torres Straits, New Guinea and Melanesia (Vol. I), Polynesia (Vol. II), and Micronesia (Vol. III). Much criticized as ‘‘intellectualist’’ for stressing the supposed thought-forms of primitive peoples (Evans-Pritchard, 1965, pp. 27–30), this approach was superseded by Malinowski’s functionalist approach (e.g., 1948) and the symbolic styles of anthropology evident in Hertz (1907/1960) but much developed by later scholars of death (e.g., Bloch & Parry, 1982; Metcalf & Huntington, 1991). Still, Frazer prompts theoretical questions of the relationship between theory, description, and interpretation as well as of ethical issues of personal judgment and cultural relativism. Volume I consists of Aberdeen’s prestigious Gifford Lectures of 1911– 1912 (1913); Volumes II (1922) and III (1924/1968) of lectures given, respectively, at the Royal Institution and at Cambridge, where Frazer was a Fellow of Trinity College and where he had become a friend of Robertson Smith (1846–1894) who had been dismissed from Aberdeen for teaching theological views pervaded by ideas of evolution (Black & Chrystal, 1912, pp. 235–404). Nearly two decades after Smith’s early death, Frazer presented Aberdeen, once more, with an evolutionary view: that the very idea of God had its origin in human Mortality, Vol. 13, No. 3, August 2008

Baring Witness: 36 Mormon women talk candidly about love, sex, and marriage

him for Oxford, but his vocation to Christian ministry, frustrated pre-transition, remained undeveloped. In Bristol, he found a trusted friend and counselor in Canon A.R. Millbourn, who offered similar non-judgmental support to Roberta Cowell, and even wrote the foreword to her autobiography. It would be interesting to know more about this mid-twentieth-century Anglican advocate for transgender people. Evangelically inclined at Oxford, while at sea Dillon/Jivaka also appreciated the pastoral care and hospitality of the Missions to Seamen, but his belief in Christ’s divinity waned and, increasingly immersed in Buddhism, he came “to the view that Christ was a Bodhisattva of a very high order who gained Buddhahood on the cross” (197). Coincidently, just prior to reading that passage, I encountered John Hick’s suggestion in The Myth of God Incarnate (SCM 1977, 176) that had Christianity moved east instead of west, Buddhists would probably have conceptualized Jesus’ religious significance by hailing him as a Bodhisattva. Inspired by Bodhisattva compassion for others, rather than preoccupation with personal salvation, Dillon/Jivaka also took the Bodhisattva Vow, but his whole life – he was just 47 when he died – exhibited unfailing patience, diligence and long suffering in the face of setback and betrayal. Even his ordination as a novice-monk was delayed because his gender history, shared in confidence, was revealed to others due to its presumed conflict with Buddhist norms of gendered perfection then prevalent. His modesty and hope in the face of these and other adversities make this a moving story as well as a valuable record.