Culture and death

Przysługujący widmom wywrotowy, niemalże rewolucyjny potencjał został odsunięty oraz zagubiony poprzez pozbycie się tej kontrowersyjnej kategorii z terytorium metafizyki i zbyt pośpieszne odesłanie jej do przestrzeni badań nad literaturą, sprowadzając ją jedynie do roli użytecznego, bezpiecznego narzędzia interpretacji.

Książka Andrzeja Marca odzyskuje niepokojący charakter widmontologii i ponownie wprowadza widma do myśli metafizycznej. Czym nawiedzona i przeniknięta jest tradycyjna metafizyka, co właściwie ją dręczy, nie daje spokoju oraz nieustannie podmywa jej stabilność?

Kategoria widma Derridy posłużyła Marcowi przede wszystkim do rozważań nad charakterem współczesności i przeobrażeń, jakie dokonały się w obrębie myśli ponowoczesnej. Współczesna kultura, zdaniem Marca, stała się miejscem powstawania widm, nieustannie powracających z przeszłości. Uznając, że nie jesteśmy już w stanie tworzyć utopijnych wizji przyszłości, autor stara się zdać sprawę z widmowego charakteru współczesnej kultury, analizując m. in. strategie vintage, retro, nurt no future w kulturze lat 70. czy nurt fantastyki naukowej w literaturze.

TWO-STAGE  (DUAL) FUNERARY RITUAL OF JAPAN AND OKINAWA AS  A CULTURAL MODEL (Abstract of the Ph.D. Thesis)
Pукопись aвторефератa диссертации на соискание ученой степени кандидата культурологии (специальность 24.00.01 – теория и история культуры, культурология).
Работа выполнена в Секторе «Языки культур» Российского института культурологии. Москва, 2005
Научный руководитель: доктор исторических наук А.Н.Мещеряков
Официальные оппоненты:
доктор филологических наук Т.П. Григорьева
доктор культурологии Т.В. Мордовцева
Ведущая организация – Санкт-Петербургский государственный университет

INTRODUCTION 5
CHAPTER 1: WHAT IN CREMATION IS GOING ON? 7
CHAPTER 2: THE ORIGIN AND PRACTICE OF CREMATION 15
CHAPTER 3: THE HISTORIC JUDEO–CHRISTIAN VIEW ON CREMATION 27
CHAPTER 4: THE REASONS FOR CREMATION EXAMINED 39
CHAPTER 5: IS CREMATION A PROPER PRACTICE? 63
CHAPTER 6: WHAT ABOUT EMBALMING? 73
CHAPTER 7: WHAT ABOUT ORGAN DONATION? 82
CHAPTER 8: WHAT IS CYRONIC SUSPENSION? 87
CHAPTER 9: CANNIBALISM: ARE YOU SERIOUS? 93
CHAPTER 10: ANSWERS TO COMMON QUESTIONS 98
APPENDIX 1: CREMATION STATISTICS IN THE UNITED STATES 108
APPENDIX 2: VARIOUS RELIGIONS ON CREMATION 112
ANNOTATED SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 115
BIBLIOGRAPHY 117
GLOSSARY 128

http://www.amazon.com/Cremation-Going-Christian-Mortem-Decisions-ebook/dp/B00P24PNM4/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1433031797&sr=1-1

CATALOGUE OF THE EXHIBITION "THE LIFE AFTER DEATH" IN THE FRAME OF THE CULTURAL CAPITAL OF EUROPE PAFOS2017 AND AARHUS2017. A CULTURAL APPROACH TO THE PRESERVATION OF THE DEAD'S MEMORY THROUGH ART AND BURIAL CUSTOMS IN CYPRUS AND DENMARK FROM ANTIQUITY TILL NOWADAYS/ ΚΑΤΑΛΟΓΟΣ ΤΗΣ ΕΚΘΕΣΗΣ "Η ΖΩΗ ΜΕΤΑ ΘΑΝΑΤΟΝ" ΣΤΑ ΠΛΑΙΣΙΑ ΤΩΝ ΠΟΛΙΤΙΣΤΙΚΩΝ ΠΡΩΤΕΥΟΥΣΩΝ ΤΗΣ ΕΥΡΩΠΗΣ ΠΑΦΟΣ2017 ΚΑΙ ΩΡΧΟΥΣ2017. ΜΙΑ ΠΟΛΙΤΙΣΜΙΚΗ ΠΡΟΣΕΓΓΙΣΗ ΣΤΗ ΔΙΑΤΗΡΗΣΗ ΤΗΣ ΑΝΑΜΝΗΣΗΣ ΤΩΝ ΤΕΘΝΕΩΤΩΝ ΜΕΣΑ ΑΠΟ ΤΗΝ ΤΕΧΝΗ ΚΑΙ ΤΙΣ ΤΑΦΙΚΕΣ ΠΑΡΑΔΟΣΕΙΣ ΣΤΗΝ ΚΥΠΡΟ ΚΑΙ ΤΗ ΔΑΝΙΑ ΑΠΟ ΤΗΝ ΑΡΧΑΙΟΤΗΤΑ ΕΩΣ ΤΙΣ ΗΜΕΡΕΣ ΜΑΣ

Human death and dying are events which involve intense experiences, both for people whose life is at an end and those around them. This article, a response to the question ‘Is dying arn occupation?’ explores some of the occupational implications of dying and an awareness of death. Both the approach of death and the experience of bereavement can be a time of great significance in the expression of human relationships through occupation. Whether the inevitable event of dying itself is an occupation is uncertain, but awareness of death provides an opportunity to review life narratives and affirm meanings.

Available in Open Access (https://opinvisindi.is/handle/20.500.11815/683).  Published by University of Iceland Press. 2018.

"I found Death and Governmentality to be compelling from beginning to end. Well-written, clearly argued, and historically situated, the book takes on the subject of grief and death in the context of recent socio-economic shifts in Iceland. The book is a wonderful achievement, taking on a subject that is at once timely and important, and giving it a treatment that is theoretically and ethnographically sound."

Anne Allison, Professor at Duke University.

Shahadat or Martyrdom is distinguished from the phenomena of death in Iran under a sacred form by the nation state. In this paper, based on the fieldwork in the biggest and the most important martyrs’ cemetery of Iran, Tehran, I will show how the nation state discriminated martyr and martyrdom from the other kinds of death and established a context to legitimate itself through three historical periods: Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iran- Iraq War in 1980 and Post-war era from 1988 up to the present.
In the conclusion it will be shown that not only Karbala event or, as Fischer have stated, Karbala paradigm in Shia culture have had an important role in constructing these two concepts and legitimizing other nation states in the history of Irano-Shiite culture but also it have had a very important function in legitimizing nation state in the contemporary Iran.
In addition, we will witness strengthening of these concepts to the extent that it caused synchronization of martyrs’ funeral with political and religious conflicts, celebration of memorial days and martyrs commemorations, symbolic funerals and recently caused creation of new burial places.

When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes, they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home. - Tecumseh

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven do not want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. - Steve Jobs

El presente artículo argumenta que Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011) puede constituir una ocasión privilegiada para pensar seriamente en la muerte en los términos que Søren Kierkegaard propone en "Junto a una tumba", generando en el espectador el mismo efecto que el discurso pretende producir en el lector.

One thing in life we can be certain of: death. But how we talk about death—its inevitability, its causes and its course, its effects, or its places—is susceptible to changing cultural conditions. Reviewing a history of death that begins in prehistory, the distinguished historian of death Thomas Laqueur doubts it is possible to comprehend (in both senses) the topic: ‘Our awareness of death and the dead stands at the edge of culture. As such they may not have a history in the usual sense but only more and more iterations, endless and infinitely varied, that we shape into n engagement with the past and the present’.

Finland holds a unique place in the geographical and cultural map of Europe by being situated between the East and the West. This article will offer a historical overview of Finland’s death culture from the point of view of the various religious and ideological practices that reflect influence from these two sides. I also explore the factors that may explain the Lutheran Church’s hegemony over death and dying in Finland.

Theobroma cacao L., otherwise known as ‘cacao’ for this paper, produces beans that helped to shape the very identity of Mesoamerican peoples, in ritual, medicinal, religious, and economic ways. This paper highlights one Mesoamerican cultural group, past and present, the Maya.  I combine varying archaeological data and interpretation with ethnohistoric and ethnographic accounts of cacao use to try and establish what cacao meant and continues to mean.

The identification of deviant burials as those of ‘vampires’ is a feature of excavated skeletons from sites across Eastern, Central and Southern Europe as well as the Balkans. Based on a close reading of historic and folkloric sources researchers have sought to match features of excavated sites with narrative descriptions drawn from vampire legend and myth. This study critically reviews the recent claims based on sites in Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Greece, Italy, Poland and Slovakia. Whilst it is found that there was a widespread belief in vampires across Europe, it is argued that it is difficult to make absolute claims for ‘vampire’ burials on archaeological grounds as in most cases there are alternate and equally compelling interpretations of the data.

KEYWORDS
ARCHAEOLOGY, HISTORY, SIXTEENTH CENTURY, SEVENTEENTH CENTURY, VAMPIRE, DEVIANT BURIAL, PLAGUE, BLACK DEATH, FOLKLORE, PAGAN, BURIAL, WITCH, BALKANS, EASTERN EUROPE, CENTRAL EUROPE, SOUTHERN EUROPE, BULGARIA, CZECH REPUBLIC, POLAND, GREECE, ITALY, SLOVAKIA, LESBOS, VENICE, APOTROPAIC, VAMPIRIDZHIJA, PERPERIKON, SOZOPOL, PROSTEJOV, CELAKOVICE, DRAWSKO, GLIWICI, SOUTHWELL, KILTEASHEEN, LAZZARETTO NUOVO, NACHTZEHRER, KAMIEN POMORSKI

In 1951 Swedish writer Stig Dagerman wrote an autobiographical essay titled "Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable." It is a remarkable poetic meditation on the life-and-death stakes of the literary imagination from a writer who was likely suffering from an undiagnosed bipolar disorder, fighting for his life through one depressive episode after another. Written when his critical reputation and fame as Sweden’s greatest new literary phenom had been firmly established following a remarkable outpouring of critically acclaimed work in the late 1940s, the essay marked a point in time when the tides had turned for Dagerman, who now struggled with the opposite of this productive streak in the form of a debilitating bout of writer’s block that would eventually contribute to his suicide two years later. "Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable" lays bare the writer’s fragile psyche, not only his faltering ego but his selfless and far from sure-footed ambition to offer something of lasting beauty and meaning to a world indifferent to his very existence. While writing the essay, Dagerman managed to rise temporarily from the depths of his depression and identify the sources of his own consolation and hope in terms that have continued to resonate powerfully with many readers, and fellow writers, over the following 60 years.

Originally published in 1952 in the improbable venue of Husmodern (a magazine dedicated to home economics for Swedish housewives, analogous to American magazines like Good Housekeeping or Better Homes and Gardens), the essay was a profound response to a trivial commission from the magazine’s editors, who asked Dagerman to send them “something on the art of living.” The soul- and psyche-searching tour de force that Dagerman composed was not likely what the editors had in mind, but to their credit—and also possibly owing to his celebrity—they published the essay as written. The essay has since been translated into 10 languages and published / reprinted a great many times. This is the first literary translation of the essay into English.

This incredible Existentialist Essay on the topic of Suicide features at the second of two essays in the volume 'The Experience of Death' by Franco-German Author Paul-Louis (also known as Paul Ludwig) Landsberg. He provides us with a deep and searching analysis of the moral issues surrounding Suicide from an Existentialist standpoint. He was to die, tragically, in a German concentration camp, though he left behind some of the most fascinating discussion of death and suicide by an Existentialist author apart from Martin Heidegger (whop did not in fact deal with the second of these two topics). Landsberg was part of the group embracing Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir. He was a Christian yet without forcing this belief upon readers through his writing. The present essay, and the book as a whole makes a deep impact upon anyone who dares to accompany the author on his dark and intense explorations. Brief biographical details and bibliography are provided in the actual book as well as full textual annotations and an Editor's note/preface.

Qui organise aujourd'hui des funérailles catholiques à Abomey, dans le sud du Bénin? Comment, pourquoi, et dans quelles conditions? Voici quelques-unes des questions auxquelles ce texte s'efforce de répondre, en replaçant ce cas dans la problématique plus générale de l'articulation entre identités religieuses et divisions sociales dans l'Afrique contemporaine.

The factor of culture plays a critical role on how people perceive and deal with death, dying and bereavement. Each culture is unique and holds different and authentic beliefs and customs. This literature review will provide information from different cultural backgrounds among the population of Hawai`i regarding death, dying and bereavement (beliefs, customs, rituals, expectations, processes, etc.). The information aims to provide social workers and other helping professionals with appropriate knowledge and skills applicable to the culture they are working with. Thus practitioners can increase their cultural competence.
 
Keywords: death, bereavement, NHPIs, social worker, Asian, Asian American, Hawai`i

Throughout the nineteenth century, Maskilic journals increased their publication of anti-Hasidic satires. From the eighteen-sixties onward, this literature came primarily as a response to the revival in the publishing of Hasidic hagiography and to the spread of Hasidism into new territory. To this point, no complete review or even general survey has been performed on this extensive polemical literature, despite the fact that it has much to teach us about Hasidism and the Haskalah in those years. We are not speaking of an insignificant bibliographical lacuna, but of a disregard for an entire field of research which would shed light not only on a forgotten chapter of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature but also on an important chapter in the relationships between Maskilim and Hasidim in that period and the genesis and development of the different streams of Hasidism. This Maskilic literature intended to do more than eradicate Hasidism; it aimed to strengthen the self-consciousness of the individual Maskilim who found themselves alone in Hasidic territory. Paradoxically, the literature documented the very movement it intended to eradicate from the world. The distorted reflection displayed in the anti-Hasidic literature does more than present a caricature of its subject -- it conceals hitherto unknown elements about the nature and development of the Hasidic movement. The present article deals with one such case, a satire on Bratslav Hasidism from 1863, which has at its core a Maskilic satirical text written by Yehiel Meller on pilgrimage to the grave of R. Nahman of Bratslav in Uman.





כתבי עת של משכילים לאורך המאה התשע עשרה הרבו לפרסם סאטירות בגנותה של החסידות. משנות הששים ואילך באה ספרות זו בעיקר כתגובה להתעוררות הדפסת ספרות השבחים החסידית ולהתפשטות החסידות במרחבים חדשים. לא קיימת עד עתה סקירה שלימה, ואף לא מיפוי כללי, של אותה ספרות פולמוסית ענפה, על אף שיש בה ללמד הרבה על דרכי החסידות וההשכלה באותן שנים.  לא מדובר רק בחסרון ביבליוגרפי שאין לו משמעות, אלא בהתעלמות משדה מחקר רב עניין שעשוי להאיר לא רק על פרק נשכח בספרות עברית ויידיש החדשה אלא גם על פרק חשוב ביחסים בין משכילים לחסידים באותה תקופה, ועל דרכי צמיחתם, פיצולם והתפתחותם של זרמים שונים בחסידות. הייתה זו ספרות שיותר מאשר נועדה לבער את החסידות נועדה לחזק את תודעתם העצמית של המשכילים הבודדים במרחבים החסידיים; ספרות שבאופן פרדוקסלי תיעדה תנועה אותה חפצו לבער מן העולם. הבבואה המעוותת בה התהדרה הסאטירה האנטי חסידית לא רק הציגה דימוי – אלא טומנת בחובה הצבעה על אלמנטים חדשים ועל התפתחויות בחסידות. במקרה אחד ממין זה הנוגע לחסידות ברסלב בשנות השישים של המאה התשע עשרה עוסק המאמר. שלפנינו - שעיקרו מהדורה של טקסט משכילי שכתב יחיאל מלר - בשנת 1863 - על העלייה לקבר ר' נחמן מברסלב באומן
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A “frying pan” of some interest, since it depicts a longboat, (Syros Museum 1163)  was found in a rescue excavation conducted under the direction of the author in the Roussos field at Chalandriani in Syros in 2002-2008. The field lies in the West Sector of the Early Cycladic Chalandriani cemetery . The excavation revealed 28 undisturbed graves of the corbelled type with grave goods more or less similar to those from Tsountas’s excavations, and distinguished by their variety and wealth. The new find (from Grave VII), besides enlarging the corpus of known depictions of longboats on ‘frying pans’, provides an opportunity, because of its well-documented contexts, to understand better certain aspects of these intriguing objects and the EBA II Chalandriani society they reflect.

From Homer’s Iliad to the Athenian funeral oration and beyond the “‘beautiful death” was the name that the Greeks used to describe a combatant’s death. From the world of Achilles to democratic Athens, in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, the warrior’s death was a model that concentrated the representations and the values that served as [masculine] norms.  This should not be a surprise: the Iliad depicts a society at war and in the Achaean camp, at least, a society of men, without children and legitimate wives. Certainly the Athenian polis (“city-state”) reversed the traditional combatant–citizen relationship by claiming that one must be, first, a citizen before being a soldier.  Nevertheless this polis distinguished itself from others by the splendour that it gave the public funeral of its citizens that had died in war and especially by the repatriating of their mortal remains (Thuc. 2.34). In a society that believed in autochthony this repatriation was, undoubtedly, significant. Since the beautiful death crystallised the aretē (“courage”) of Achilles and Athenians alike, it was, from the outset, linked to speech. Indeed heroic death and the civic beautiful death were the subject-matter of elaborate speech. Such a celebratory discourse gave the warrior’s death an eternal existence in memory. This discourse gave his death its reality, but, conversely, also took for itself all that was valued in his accomplished exploit and claimed to be its truthful expression. In short the beautiful death was a paradigm.

The practice of taking pictures of the dead is not only circumscribed to police reports or forensic studies, nor is it merely a footnote in the history of photography. Due to the country’s history and culture, this phenomenon is particularly prevailing in Mexico, and has even permeated the work of foreign artists working in the country. This paper analyzes postmortem photographs from different sources: an archive of Mexican memento mori, the work of Joel-Peter Witkin and the media coverage of the “War on Drugs,” in order to elucidate the role of this phenomenon in Mexican society.

"Representations", N. 129, Winter 2015.

The essay analyzes the project of maintaining the body of V. I. Lenin in the Mausoleum in Moscow for the past ninety years, focusing on the unique biological science that developed around this project, and the unexpected political role this body has performed.

A series of five mysterious, portraitlike images produced by Sandro Botticelli's workshop in the late fifteenth century shows the same female sitter, bust length, in profile, with an extremely ornate hairstyle. These images are difficult to classify. On the one hand, they follow the conventions of portraiture-they show a single, bust-length figure in profile against a plain, colored background or an architectural setting; on the other hand, because the woman is portrayed with decorated, loose, overabundant, waving hair and somewhat classical dress, she appears to be a more generalized typea nymph or goddess rather than a mortal woman. Besides being visually intriguing in their own right, these images have played a pivotal, although not always fully acknowledged, role in the historiography of Botticelli, of his famous painting Primavera (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence), and, by extension, of Florentine culture and society under the rule of Lorenzo de' Medici. The various images have often been identified as portraits of Simonetta Cattaneo Vespucci, a Genoese woman married to a Florentine, who was the object of Giuliano de' Medici's unrequited love. Simonetta was Giuliano's "Petrarchan mistress"-a beautiful, chaste, and unattainable upper-class woman whom he adored from afar in the spirit of Petrarch's love for Laura. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many paintings by Botticelli were believed to contain likenesses of Simonetta. She was thought to be the model for Venus in Mars and Venus (National Gallery, London) and the Birth of Venus (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence), for Venus or Flora in the Primavera, for Judith, and for the Madonna del Magnificat (all Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence), to name only a few examples. While many of these identifications are not now accepted, Simonetta continues to play an important role in the interpretation of Botticelli's images. Dempsey has recently reintroduced the theory that Flora in the Primavera represents Simonetta.1 For the most part, however, contemporary scholars are wary of the "Simonetta theory." As a result, they have severed the connection between Simonetta and the portraitlike images from Botticelli's workshop, preferring to call these images "ideal heads"-creations of a generic conception of female beauty.2 What, however, is meant by an "ideal"? Where does this ideal come from and what is its purpose? Can we be sure that these portraitlike images are not meant to refer to a particular woman? I will show that the effect of the images hinges on how they operate between the categories of portrait and ideal. They transform an actual woman, quite possibly Simonetta, into an ideal based on Petrarchan poetry. I will examine the way in which the artist invokes and combines two types of representation of womenportraits and depictions of nymphs or goddesses. I will argue that evidence that the images portray Simonetta is not as negligible as some art historians have assumed. Finally, I will compare the images to poems written about Simonetta after her early death. The correspondences between poems and images not only support the idea that the paintings refer to Simonetta but, more important, they reveal how dead young noblewomen could be idealized, even eroticized, in both poetry and painting. The late fifteenth-century "portraits" from Botticelli's workshop are early examples of the problematic category of Renaissance paintings identified by Cropper as "portraits of unknown beautiful women."5 In many sixteenth-century images, as in the Simonetta pictures,4 it is difficult to determine whether an actual woman, an ideal, a courtesan, or a goddess is represented. As Cropper says, "a portrait of a beautiful woman is not...simply a portrait with a female rather than a male subject."5 However, the new genre is not a vision of a generic female ideal, either. Indeed, the play between "real" and "imaginary" woman is central to the effect both of the Simonetta and of the later, sixteenth-century images. Although the Simonetta paintings can be seen as precursors of the many Venetian sensuous half-length images, of Raphael's Fornarina (Galleria Nazionale, Rome), and of the Leonardo school's "Mona Vanna" images, they have a different erotic appeal. Unlike the more sensual and direct address of the sixteenthcentury

It seems likely that the practice of dream incubation as a ritual — began in a distant past when it was usual to worship a female deity as creatrix of the universe. The dreams sought by her supplicants offered them oracles, wise counsel, contact with the ancestors, divine inspiration and perhaps even a sort of miracle-working in an Otherworld. Before human language for example, dreams would have had a distinctly different character. Modern dreams contain thought-forms and imagery created by language. Dreams evolve within the cultural landscape.

This article explores the relationship between common dream phenomena (meeting the deceased and other supernatural events) and the development of religious ideas.

Review of Freud, Pscyhoanalysis and Death (CUP, 2013) by Martin Schmidt, Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2016, 61, 2, 244–248.

This is perhaps not the first review to read if you want a comprehensive understanding of the book (try Silverman, above for that), but it's nice and offers some comments on it.

Sob a égide dos ensinamentos de Philippe Ariès, Norbert Elias, Marcel Conche
entre outros, buscamos pensar sobre a morte e o morrer em um panorama
multidisciplinar em dialogo com as mais distintas obras literárias que buscam abordar o
assunto, voltadas para os jovens leitores. Nos perguntamos: como falar sobre morte com
crianças? Como os livros infantis lidam com isso?
Por encontrarmos em nossa sociedade um interdito sobre os temas relacionados
a morte, ao trabalharmos com conhecidos autores de obras infantojuvenis como Lygia
Bojunga, Mauricio de Sousa, Ziraldo, Monteiro Lobato, Neil Gaiman, etc, buscamos
verificar como em nossa atual sociedade o assunto será abordado e como se dá o papel
da criança diante da morte quando essa questão é cercada de tabus. Então, utilizando as
narrativas selecionadas para a montagem de um corpus de trabalho, as separando de
acordo com aspectos comuns e, dessa forma, trabalhamos comparativamente buscando
respostas às questões propostas indicadas.

An examination of the paintings on classic attic white ground funerary lekythoi that depict ‘death and grave’ in a tight association with the re-emerging attic grave-reliefs after the middle of the 5th century B.C. leads to the conclusion that here and there not only the social role of the deceased in this world, but also the accomplishment of the experience of death  was a central concern of the images: one hand by describing death as an experienced farewell, but also on the other hand by making strongly aware the potential reunion and lasting community of life and death on the regular erected and visited grave-monument. Especially the rituals described on the grave lekythoi certified on the later grave reliefs that the integrity of familiar communities was not destroyed by death. The painful and disturbing experience of death was integrated in this way as an indispensable part of life in the polis community, but dealing with it also awarded it (in accordance with the established rules) a customizable form, which set structure and a secure hold against the event invading the family all of a sudden. The erection of the tombs and the execution of the rituals attached to it promised - not least also as factors averting fear - the possibility of an ideational cancellation of human finitude.