Death And Its Social Implications

5 Pages 1336 Words

Death is the one social process that can be said is universal to all societies. However, what death actually means and the processes surrounding this transition are not so universal. Rituals are one way through which members process their grief and attempt to restore the social order back to their societies.

The meaning of death:
For the Merina, specific groups of people and specific areas of land are inextricably linked with fertility and the regeneration of life. For them, death is a time of mixed joy and sorrow: sorrow at the fact that they have lost a relative, but joy at the fact that the deceased will be regrouped with the ancestors. Therefore, the Merina funerary practices are centred around the theme of rejoining the ancestors and receiving blessing.

The Lugbara see death as being the cause of an external and superhuman power – that of divinity. However, because women are associated with the power that comes from divinity, they are seen as the cause of death. Death disturbs the social order and their funerary rituals try to restore this order as fully as possible. There is also a distinction between physical and social deaths, which need not necessarily come together: e.g., in the case of the rain-maker, who undergoes a ‘social death’ at his time of initiation, when he has a full burial ceremony, and at the time of his physical death, his corpse is disposed of at night and in complete silence.

The Cantonese show extreme ambivalence toward the physical remains of the deceased and they consider mentioning the subject of death as bad luck. The bones of the deceased must be preserved as they are essential to the well-being of the descendants but the flesh is highly polluting and must be dealt with very carefully. Hence, the Cantonese funerary rituals involve the managing of the pollution of death and to aid the successful transition of the deceased from a corpse to an ancestor. Males and females have their own speci...