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The Impossibility of Death: Introduction to Funerary Practices and Models in the Ancient Andes

par Eeckhout, Peter ;Owens, Lawrence S.; [et al.]
Editeur scientifique Eeckhout, Peter ;Owens, Lawrence S.
Référence The Return of The Living Dead, Funerary Practices and Models in the Ancient Andes, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, Ed. 1
Publication A Paraître, 2015-02-01

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Résumé :

The omnipresent awareness of the inevitability of death distinguishes humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. Humanity’s wide range of means for dealing with issues connected with mortality is expressed in a plethora of material culture expressions that burgeon throughout the evolutionary history of Homo (sapiens) sapiens (Parker Pearson 2000: 146-154). Systems-based archaeological and ethnographic approaches to funeral traditions show the variability of social strategies that groups have evolved to contend with the social upheaval caused by the demise of one of their members; the visibility and elaborateness of these manifestations tend to increase with the complexity and size of the population in question, as well as the status of individuals (Binford 1971). It is a measure of humanity’s seemingly limitless ability to rationalise phenomena through a ritualisation process that has brought about a near-universal historically and ethnographically attested tendency towards a belief in the concept of an afterlife, which increases in visibility if not intensity from the Palaeolithic onwards. Death therefore appears to have become part of the social landscape, structured by religions and belief systems that posit infinitely variable hereafters: existences beyond physical demise. When compared to the majority of such perspectives, the secular concept of death is a rather modern-and somewhat nihilistic-notion. However, the manner in which the relationship between the current plane of existence and that of the hereafter was configured varies dramatically between groups. It can be conceived as a distinct discontinuity in the natural order, with a discrete life in the beyond that would not necessarily bear any resemblance to current existence. Some groups believe that the fabric between this dimension and the hereafter was so thin that it permitted both to be part of a continuum in which the dead could continue to play an active role in the living (notably their descendants), and/or to become reincarnated in a cyclical process.