General - Death, Anthropology, Ritual, etc

• General
  • - Buddhism and Indian background
  • - Death, anthropology, ritual, etc
• Burma/Myanmar
• China
• Laos and Thailand
• Ceylon/Sri Lanka

General - Death, anthropology, ritual, etc

This section lists works that deal with the general anthropology of death in a variety of societies and historical periods. Most of these are not related to Buddhism, but the examination of a phenomenon like death always oscillates between ‘anthropological universals’ and particular aspects of specific cultures, societies and historical periods. The section mostly covers works from the disciplines of Social Anthropology, Sociology, History and Religious Studies and also has an emphasis on theories of ritual.

• Aldhouse-Green, S. (1986). Art, Ritual and Death in Prehistory: Explaining the Unexplainable. Cardiff, National Museums & Galleries of Wales.
• Ariès, P. (1974). Western attitudes toward death: from the Middle Ages to the present. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press.
  [classical historical study about changing attitudes towards death in Western societies]
• Battaglia, D. (1990). On the Bones of the Serpent: Person, Memory, and Mortality In Sabarl Island Society. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
• Barley N. (1995). Dancing on the Grave: Encounters with Death. London, John Murray.
• Barraud, C. et al. (1994). Of relations and the dead: four societies viewed from the angle of their exchanges. Oxford, Providence, USA, Berg.
  [focuses on exchange theory and its relevance for the maintenance of post-mortem relationships]
• Bell, C. M. (1992). Ritual theory, ritual practice. New York, Oxford University Press.
  [very good overview of various ritual theories, develops her own practice based theory]
• Binski, P. (1996). Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation. London: British Museum Press.
• Bloch, M. (1971). Placing the dead: tombs, ancestral villages and kinship organization in Madagascar. London, Seminar Press Ltd.
• Bloch, M. and J. P. Parry (1982). Death and the regeneration of life. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
  [classical collection on the anthropology of death, very good introduction]
• Brandes, S. (1997). "Sugar, Colonialism, & Death: On the Origins of Mexico's Day of the Dead." Comparative Studies in Society & History 39(2): 270-299.
• Bradbury, M. (1996). Representations of 'Good' and 'Bad' Death Among Deathworkers and the Bereaved. Contemporary Issues in the Sociology of Death, Dying and Disposal. G. Howarth and P. C. Jupp. New York, St. Martin's Press.
• Chambert-Loir, H. and A. Reid (2002). The potent dead: Ancestors, saints and heroes in contemporary Indonesia. University of Hawai'i Press.
  [a collection examining the death practices and rituals of Indonesian tribal groups in the context of ongoing changes in Islam]
• Carrithers, M.; S. Collins, S. Lukes (Eds.) (1985). The Category of the Person. Anthropology, Philosophy, History. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
  [very good study of what it means to be a ‘person’ and therefore also relevant for ideas about death and afterlife]
• Cederroth, S., C. Corlin, et al. (1988). On the meaning of death: essays on mortuary rituals and eschatological beliefs. Uppsala Stockholm, Sweden, [Ubsaliensis Academiae]; Distributed by Almqvist & Wiksell International.
• Childs, G. H.  (2004). Tibetan Diary: from Birth to Death and beyond in a Himalayan Valley of Nepal.  Berkeley, University of California Press.
• Cole, S. L. (1986). The Absent One: Mourning Ritual, Tragedy, and the Performance of Ambivalence. University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press.
• Conklin, B. A. (1995). "Thus Are Our Bodies, Thus Was Our Custom: Mortuary Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society." American Ethnologist 22(1):75-101.
• Cuevas, B. J., J. I. Stone, et al. (2007). The Buddhist dead: practices, discourses, representations. Honolulu, University of Hawai'i Press.
• Damon, F. H. and R. Wagner (1989). Death Rituals and Life in the Societies of the Kula Ring. DeKalb, Ill., Northern Illinois University Press.
  [death rituals and their social context in Melanesian societies]
• Danforth, L. M. (1982). The Death Rituals of Rural Greece. Guildford: Princeton University Press.
• Davies, D. J. (1997). Death, Ritual, and Belief: The Rhetoric of Funerary Rites. London, Cassell.
• Davies, J. (1994). Ritual and Remembrance: Responses to Death in Human Societies. Sheffield, Sheffield Academic Press.
• Davis, D. J., (2000). “Robert Hertz: The social triumph over death”. Mortality 5/1: 97-102.
• Fabian, J. (1991). "How others die - reflections on the anthropology of death." Time and the Work of Anthropology. Critical Essays 1971-1991. Chur.
• Finn, T. M. (1997). From Death to Rebirth: Ritual and Conversion in Antiquity. New York, Paulist Press.
• Freud, S. (1989 [1917]). Mourning and Melancholia. The Freud Reader. G. Peter. Norton, New York.
• Goody, J. (1962). Death, property and the ancestors. A study of the mortuary customs of the LoDagaa of West Africa. London, Tavistock Publications.
• Goody, J. (1977). Against Ritual: Loosely Structured Thoughts on a Loosely Defined Topic. Secular Ritual. S. F. Moore and B. Myerhoff. Amsterdam.
• Hallam, E. and J. Hockey (2001). Death, Memory and Material Culture. Oxford: Berg.
• Hertz, R. (1960). A contribution to the study of the collective representation of death. Death and the right hand. R. Needham. Aberdeen, University Press Houlbrooke.
  [classical anthropological study of death rituals which remains influential until today. Introduces the idea of the ‘second burial’ found in many societies]
• Humphreys, S. C. and H. King (1981). Mortality and immortality: the anthropology and archaeology of death. London, Academic Press.
• LaFleur, W. R. (1992). Liquid Life: Abortion and Buddhism in Japan. Princeton, Princeton University Press.
• Laidlaw, J. and C. Humphrey (1994). The Archetypal Actions of Ritual: A Theory of Ritual Illustrated by the Jain Rite of Worship. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  [besides Catherine Bell’s study another influential anthropological theory of ritual]
• Lewis, G. (1980). Day of shining red: an essay on understanding ritual. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
• Llewellyn, N. (1981). The Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual C.1500-C.1800. London, Reaktion.
• Macho, T. H. (1987). Todesmetaphern: Zur Logik der Grenzerfahrung. Frankfurt/M., Suhrkamp.
  [great study on philosophical and anthropological aspects of death, unfortunately only available in German]
• Macho, T. (1998). "Der zweite Tod. Zur Logik doppelter Bestattungen“. Paragrana: Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie 7, 2: 43-60.
• Macho, T. and K. Marek (Eds.) (2007): Die neue Sichtbarkeit des Todes Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag
• Malinowski, B. (2008). Baloma; the Spirits of the Dead in the Trobriand Islands. London, Forgotten Books Series.
• Metcalf, P. and R. Huntington (1991). Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual. 2nd revised ed. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
  [good introduction book to the anthropology of death]
• Miller, D. and F. Parrott (2009). “Loss and material culture in South London.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 15(3): 502-519.
• Morris, I. (1992). Death-Ritual and Social Structure in Classical Antiquity. Key Themes in Ancient History. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
• Pallis, P. and H. Abramavitch (1984). Death: A Cross-Cultural Perspective, Annual Review of Anthropology 13: 385-417.
• Parkin, D. (1992). Ritual as spatial direction and bodily division. Understanding Rituals. D. de Coppet. London.
• Parry, Jonathan P. (1994). Death in Banaras. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
  [very sophisticated study on Hindu funeral practices]
• Paxton, F. S. (1990). Christianizing Death: The Creation of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe. Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press.
• Peyer, N. (2004). Death and Afterlife in a Tamil Village: Discourses of Low Caste Women. Münster, Lit.
• Pina-Cabral, J. De (1980). "Cults of the dead in Northern Portugal." Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 9: 1-31.
• Prioreschi, P. (1990). A History of Human Responses to Death: Mythologies, Rituals and Ethics. Studies in Health and Human Services, no. 17. New York, Lewiston.
• Rappaport, R. A. (1967). Pigs for the Ancestors. Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People. New Haven, Yale University Press.
• Ralph, A. (1989). Death, Ritual, and Bereavement. London, Routledge.
• Rushton, L. (1993). Death Customs. Comparing Religions. New York, Thomson Learning.
• Seremetakis, C. N. (1991). The Last Word. Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
• Suzuki, H. (2000). The Price of Death: The Funeral Industry in Contemporary Japan. Stanford, Stanford University Press.
• Tambiah, S. J. (1985). A Performative Approach to Ritual. Culture, Thought and Social Action. S. J. Tambiah. Chicago.
• Thomas, L.-V. (1975). Anthropologie de la mort. Paris, Payot.
• Tsiaras, A. (1982). The Death Rituals of Rural Greece. Princeton.
• van Gennep, A. (1960 [1st ed. 1909 in French]). The Rites of Passage. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press.
  [first study that analysed life-cycle rituals in a comparative perspective]
• Vitebsky, P. (1993). Dialogues with the Dead: The Discussion of Mortality among the Sora of Eastern India. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
  [very interesting book on shamanism in East India, contains detailed transcripts of dialogues with the dead]
• Wilson, L. (2003). The living and the dead: social dimensions of death in South Asian religions. Albany, State University of New York Press.

(Back to top)