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Summary SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 212 NOTES
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INTRODUCTION TO ANTHROPOLOGYWeek 1: Death and Being Human
[Lecture 1: Introduction]
Death is a biological reality but also has impact on the living. It has a long social history as
well.
COVID-19 has shown us wide ranges of:
Political consequences.
- States closing borders and removing nationals from certain high-risk countries.
- Politicians held accountable for providing health care.
- Impact on human rights and freedoms we had as democratic citizens.
- States has also acquired enormous powers of surveillance and coercion.
- Impact on city planning. Where to quarantine people like the homeless.
- States has also need to think of building new hospitals, where to bury the dead and
how to dispose of corpses that has been infected by COVID-19.
Social Consequences
- Social distancing impacts our kinship relationships.
- Generational shifts.
- Creating fictive kinship
o def: social ties that are based on neither consanguineal (blood ties) nor affinal
(by marriage) ties, in contrast to true kinship ties.
o Creating a community far from home where they are stranded with fellow
sufferers.
o Discover in 1930s and 1940s
o Creating ties with people not biological related to you.
o Different ways of mourning a loved one’s death. People die alone.
o Popular media made it common for us to see.
Economy Consequences
- Worldwide crash of stocks and bonds.
- Freefall in developing countries as investors move to the safer option of dollars.
- Questions surrounding the cost of death and the cost of testing for COVID-19.
o Who is going to bare these costs?
o Where are these costs going to be recuperated from?
, - Changes in consumer behaviour as many people started stock piling.
Proto-Anthropologists: Death and The Definition of Religion
- Founding fathers were interest in death because they study social evolution.
- The early evolutionists, including Herbert Spencer, used death to explain the origins
of religion.
- Herbert Spencer believed that all humans were rational and can be fitted onto an
evolutionary scale.
o He argued that religion developed out of the mystery of dreams.
o People realize that because they can dream, they realise that they can leave
their body.
o This creates a dualism of body and mind/spirit.
o With these explanations they considered spirits living on after death. (Visit the
living in their dreams.) Marks the start of a believe in ancestors and the
generation of them which he argued was the root of all religion.
- EB Tylor and James Frazer
- Death was imagined in the way people saw social evolution.
- Universal features in diverse cultural responses to death:
o By the early 1900s they realised that although all humans are biologically
similar, they way in which they use their bodies socially are different.
Even the way they walked was culturally conditioned.
People eat different, have different sleep patterns and participation in
sex differs.
o Cultural commonalties include:
Incest Taboo (prohibition on sex with kin)
Death is treated as a social phenomenon of much importance.
The Universality of Death as Something of Social Import to the Living
- Universally people transcend the reality of biological death by transforming lifeless
corpses into accenting ancestors, ghosts, possessing spirits, pure souls, non-
persons and stuff that can be traded for other things, that can be resumed, be
remade.
- Such transformation is accompanied by rituals.
Transformation also Through Hard Mental Work
- Ann-Christine Taylor on the Jivaro, Ecuador described that they believed in ways to
transform the dead into spirts. By doing that they tried people to forget the faces of
, their loved ones that passed on. Made painstaking work to disremember. Chanting
descriptions of the decomposition process in attempts to erase familiar faces.
- Patrick Williams on the Manus (Gypsies) of Central France noted that they showed
great respect for the death by never mentioning the dead, destroying all property they
owned as well as anything reminding them of the dead.
Great Variation in Cultural Beliefs about Death and Dying
- West: Irreversible, once-off.
- Hindu: Stage in the cycle of reincarnation. Born and dies repeatedly until it is not tied
to the cycle of reincarnation anymore.
Technology Influence on the Definition of Death
- First heart transplant 1967 that the medical profession needed to define death to
protect their own.
- 1981 US Uniform Determination of Death Act established that a person is dead when
an irreversible coma has set in and a person is brain dead.
- In Japan, this definition is not widely accepted. They don’t view the brain as the seed
of personhood but rather the heart. A person is only declared dead if the whole ritual
of cremation is completed.
Bereavement are not universally expressed. Culturally determined and expressed.
- An Ilongot (Philippians), head hunting used to be an expression of grief. Rage as a
emotion.
- Grief on the social barriers of North-East Brazil, mothers excepted the death of their
young ones stoically, they believed that crying would wake the wings of the spiritual
angels and keep them from ascending to heaven. (Pity rather than grief)
First Anthropologists and Death
- Focus more on the practises and rituals surrounding death by doing ethnographies
and analyses.
- 1925: Malinowski’s book “Magic, Science and Religion” said that people had a
universal fear of death and complimented by an equally universal belief in immortality
of the soul. Religion gives people a comforting feeling toward immortality. Rituals and
practices restore the group that was disturbed by the death of someone.
- 1937: Evans-Pritchard’s book “Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande”
wrote that the Azande believed in natural and magical causes of death. Believed that
natural death was caused by witchcraft and the society found it important to find the
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