An examination of the ways various cultures dealt with death, Look at the Sky is a lively treatment of a difficult subject. Shawn Haley manages to fascinate and educate as he describes the various ways bodies are disposed of or discusses where the souls go, if anywhere. Here is how he opens this amusing and often startling account:
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Death is not a popular subject. In fact, we often refuse to accept the inevitable and admit that someday we too will die. We don't want to talk about it or even think about it. When someone we know dies, often the first emotion we feel is anger at the person for leaving us at an inopportune time. The second is relief that it was someone else who died. (The third is guilt when we realize that the first two emotions are generally inappropriate).
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When thoughts of death do invade our minds, we bury them in euphemism and metaphor. We refer to the dead as the deceased. We say that he or she “kicked the bucket” or “bought the farm.” A person has “passed away,” “gone to his reward” or “gone to meet his maker.” We are not alone in our dislike of the reality. The Kwakiutl, a Northwest Coast people, refer to dying as “growing weak” or “to be laying down” and to death as “disappearing from the world.” The Inuit of northern Canada say that a dead person is “looking at the sky,” a comment on how the dead person is laid out for the funeral (that is, on his back). Unfortunately, no matter how vehement our denials, human beings begin their journey towards death at the very moment of conception. This is a biological certainty in that death is pre-programmed. There is no way around it nor can we predict when death will occur.
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Whether we like it or not, there are two harsh realities to consider. First, the living witness the death of loved ones, friends and strangers. They feel the sudden acute void in their lives - a gap left vacant by the departure of the deceased. Of course, the gap or void, the degree of loss depends on the closeness of the individual to the deceased (as perceived by the survivor). The survivor must somehow come to grips with the loss. Second, in dealing with another's death, people also must recognize and acknowledge their own mortality. This awareness that death, particularly one's own, is inevitable and unavoidable creates a need at some point to explain the phenomenon.
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Death is a great void, a virtual unknown although many religious practitioners would argue this point. Without an explanation, without some way to offer reassurance that there is "life after death," people face the abyss with apprehension and fear just as they do with anything that involves great change and unknown quantities. Tylor and others have argued that an attempt to cope with the idea of death and with dreams, during which it was possible to visit distant relatives and the dead, gave rise to religions.
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In Tylor's view, religion may stem from speculation about such states as dreams, trances, and death. The dead, the distant, those in the next house, animals - all seem real in dreams and trances. The lifelike appearances of these imagined persons and animals suggests a dual existence for all things - a physical, visible body and a psychic, invisible soul. This dual existence formed the basis of a religious belief Tylor called animism.
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Not all cultures react to the loss of a fellow human in the same way nor do they explain death in similar manners. “Societies differ in the kinds of supernatural beings or forces they believe in and the character of these beings. They also differ in the structure and hierarchy of those beings, in what the beings actually do, and in what happens to people after death.” How our world's peoples deal with these all too common problems is the subject of this book. Using ethnographies and other written accounts, I have summarized the solutions arrived at within a number of cultural groups. As a baseline for comparison, I used the modern industrial world's approach to death since it is the one we are all most keenly aware of. Of course, it is nearly as varied as the nonwestern views and I will attempt to point out some of these variations at appropriate junctures in the text. | |
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